Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft

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Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote so many obituaries himself, is remembered in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright, the son of a fellow Yorkshire Liberal MP:

Michael Meadowcroft, who has died aged 84 after a short illness, was a Yorkshire Liberal politician and activist of great resource and flair. He constantly wrong-footed Labour in its former heartlands in Leeds as a nimble source of new ideas, closely in touch with voters and patient at working with them to get local problems solved.

He served as a Liberal party member of Leeds city council from 1968 to 1983, and then as an MP for Leeds West for four years.

Meadowcroft was famously the only MP in the city’s history who led a weekend jazz ensemble in the main shopping precinct, pausing between numbers to discuss political issues with passers-by.

Exuberantly self-confident, he was a natural challenger with less interest in becoming part of any status quo. But he was steeped in Liberal philosophy as well as being a rigorous organiser, central to the party’s adoption of "community politics" during its resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s.

The Joy of Six 1528

Tom Williams reports from Southampton: "The demonstration descended into rioting as protesters clashed with police. Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred. They marched to Belmont Road, where Nowak was killed. Riot police prevented them reaching Digwa’s family home."

"I had expected to meet a former MP with the usual recollections and political anecdotes. What I encountered instead was something rarer: a political thinker who remained genuinely concerned with ideas, and who was determined to dispel the myths that had accumulated around Liberal history like barnacles on a ship's hull." Andrew Page pays tribute to Michael Meadowcroft.

Matthew Pennell analyses last month's local election results and looks forward to future conquests: "What are the key battlegrounds in England? In 2027 we’ll see if we can build on long term gains in North Yorkshire and East Riding, whether we can retake Bedford and if there’s a chance of completing jigsaw in the far West of England by flipping the status of Herefordshire."

Ellie Davies talks to three Bristol academics about the impact that villages – both literal and metaphorical – have on our health and happiness.

"She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives." Lara Feigel salutes the continuing relevance of Laura Knight.

"There is an unavoidable ethical dimension to all this: though Payne’s deeply-considered and expert work on the sketches was clearly much more than the 'tinkering' Elgar was worried about, we have to acknowledge that the composer’s wish needs to be more-or-less disregarded if we are to perform or listen to the completed work." Jeremy Benson on Elgar's unfinished third symphony.

Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026)

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Sad news on Liberal Democrat Voice this morning: Michael Meadowcroft has died at the age of 84.

His victory in Leeds West in 1983 – the first Liberal gain from Labour at a general election in decades – was one of the few high points of what was, in the context of the Alliance's hopes and ambitions, a deeply disappointing election night.

By then Michael already had a reputation as the Liberal Party's thinker – I remember the frisson when he turned up on the final day of a Union of Liberal Students conference in Leeds in 1979. His pamphlets for Liberator gave you some hope that there was still a coherent Liberal philosophy that was distinct from centrism or social democracy.

Michael was unable to hold Leeds West in 1987 and the West Leeds Dispatch summarises his later career:

Following his defeat he turned to journalism and was a columnist in The Times and The Yorkshire Post. In later years he wrote obituaries of political figures for both The Guardian and Yorkshire Post.

From 1990 he was a consultant to new and emerging democracies and for 26 years led or was a member of 50 missions to 35 different countries

His attempt to run a continuing Liberal Party after the foundation of the Liberal Democrats soon foundered, and he later joined the merged party. It's a mark of his forbearance that he never once objected to my purloining his name to give to Lord Bonkers' gardener.

"Where's my bloody toast, Churchill?": Our Trivial Fact of the Day

A.C. MacLaren, captain of Lancashire and England, once made 424 against Somerset. He was a hero of the great cricket journalist Neville Cardus, who had watched him as a boy, but few others:

The truth is that MacLaren wasn't good with people, his judgements of them often colossally wrong headed. He had a bedside manner based on the barked order, a fact traceable as far back as his schooldays at Harrow. 

His fag was a "quite useless" and "snotty little bugger" unsuited to the sporting life, which in MacLaren's opinion made him the legitimate butt of ridicule and ritual cruelty. The fag's name was Winston Churchill.

This passage comes from Duncan Hamilton's The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus. 

The book begins with a moving tribute to John Arlott's kindness to Hamilton when he was a young journalist and ends with an acknowledgment to Michael Meadowcroft for his searches in the National Liberal Club's archives. You can't ask for more than that.

BOOK REVIEW When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator.

When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis Paperback

edited by Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood

Beecroft Publications, 2025, £15

When We Speak of Freedom, as a football commentator would put it, is very much a book of two halves. The first is historical, philosophical and a little quirky in its approach: the second has chapters by policy experts with concrete proposals for government action in their fields.

The editors, Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood, write that the project began over wine and sandwiches at the home of Elizabeth Bee and Michael Meadowcroft, where a small group talked of “contemporary politics, memories of liberal triumphs past, and our hopes for the future”. Their hope that the book is “suffused with the warmth, intellectual curiosity, and hospitality of that first meeting,” is met in many of the 20 chapters of this engaging collection

I had thought of writing an elegant essay that drew together the diverse themes of the book, but so diverse are they that I decided to go against every canon of reviewing and tell you what’s in the book.

One complaint: there’s no index. I’m sure the John Stuart Mill Institute, who publish When We Speak of Freedom, didn’t have the budget for a professional indexer, but Mill himself does pop up in many chapters, and it would be good to be able to compare what different authors have to say about the old boy. You can ask contributors to a collection like this to highlight the names they quote or discuss, and produce an index of sorts from that.

And so to the 20 chapters…

Michael Meadowcroft has expanded his introduction into a pamphlet – see the note at the end. Here he writes of a “crisis of democracy” and does not see its resolution coming from economic growth or any other of the policy prescriptions that dominate political debate. Rather, he looks to another Victorian sage, John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”

Benjamin Wood looks to two Liberal heroes: Jo Grimond and Hannah Arendt. He sees them as students of Classical Greece who, inspired by a vision of the Greek city-state purged of slavery, sought a politics that is more human in its scale and less obsessed with getting and spending. Wood concludes in language they would approve: “Citizenship must mean more than a flag and a passport” and be “an invitation into a shared project of civic betterment.”

Helena Rosenblatt writes on Mill and On Liberty, reminding us that there’s more to it than the harm principle. She emphasises Mill’s championing of individuality and the flowering of character – both a long way from the atomistic individualism of which Liberals are often accused. Rosenblatt also writes of Mill’s awareness of social tyranny: he said, “the yoke of opinion could often be heavier than the law” – Liberal Democrat habitués of social media please note.

Christopher England and Andrew Phemister contribute a fascinating chapter on liberalism, land and democracy – Henry George, the Diggers and radical crofters are all there. My only regret is that they had to end so soon in the story, as issues like the quality of food, and access to the countryside for health, wellbeing and recreation, will only grow in importance. Let’s take this history as an inspiration.

Emmy van Deurzen looks at the tensions today between individuality and people’s need for community. These can give rise to individual mental health problems and to social problems, such as a widespread withdrawal from engagement in politics. She seeks a cure for both kinds of problems through political change and bringing more philosophy and psychology into our politics. Interestingly, both Mill and Hannah Arendt turn up here too.

Helen McCabe usefully reminds us that there is far more to Mill than On Liberty. She looks at his support for women’s suffrage, and for their liberation more widely, as well as his opposition to domestic violence. Then there is Mill’s advocacy of workplace democracy and producer cooperatives – causes that were still dear to the Liberal Party when I joined it, but are now little discussed.

Timothy Stacey offers a diagnosis of modern liberalism’s ills. He sees it as lacking “that je ne sais quoi that makes us fall in love with political visions”, and as inclined to fuel the divisive public debate that it hopes to dispel. His answer is that we should seek to foster liberal virtues. This I’m happy to agree with, even though I’m not convinced by the list of them he gives, as our view of ethics today is so dominated by rights, with the concomitant duty falling upon the state, that we offers little sense of what the good life looks like to a liberal.

Matthew McManus takes us back to Mill’s wider political views, finding in them an answer to our discontents under neoliberalism. He points to Mill’s support for worker cooperatives, a welfare state, representative democracy with universal suffrage, and his strong commitment to liberal rights. This he terms Mill’s “liberal socialism”, arguing rightly that its more useful to use the plural ‘socialisms’ than to see socialism as the monolith it once was.

From here on, the chapters are less philosophical and more devoted to particular policy areas and what Liberalism can contribute to them.

Edward Robinson on Liberalism and the environmental crisis is the first of these, and he commends three writers to us. First, Mark Stoll, an economic historian who has studied the British economist William Stanley Jevons – Jevons grasped in the mid 19th century that extractive industries would not last for ever and wrote about the moral implications. Second, Brett Christophers, who argues that energy cannot be produced and traded like a conventional commodity. Third, Dieter Helm, who argues that the marketisation of public goods has been a mistake.

Denis Robertson Sullivan argues there has been market failure and policy failure in the provision of housing, meaning government intervention is needed. Home ownership is in retreat, so there need to be policies for providing the sort of rented accommodation that people want. Banks and pension funds must be encouraged or forced to invest more in social housing, and there needs to be new urgency in the fight against homelessness, with government setting targets and publicising the progress made.

Stuart White looks for practical means to bring about the economy of cooperatives that Mill advocated. He discusses the role of trade unions and a sovereign wealth fund, and suggests, I think fairly, that modern Liberals are slow to recognise the existence of structural inequalities in society or the need to organise to challenge them.

Paul Hindley writes on spreading ownership through society, throwing in a good quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” He sees this spread as a way of countering the effects of insecure employment and an increasingly punitive welfare state, and repeats the traditional Liberal call for more taxation of wealth and less of income.

Gordon Lishman examines some dilemmas Liberals face around community, diversity and nonconformity. He doesn’t offer neat problems or neat solutions – in a way his point is that there aren’t any – but he is surely right to conclude that the decline of voluntary associations and the rise of the internet have made it hard to conduct community politics in the way that Liberals learnt to do in the 1970s.

Bob Marshall-Andrews looks at current and not so current challenges to civil liberties – there’s a lot about his opposition to his own party’s more draconian proposals in his years as a Labour MP between 1997 and 2010). He is very good on the way that governments generate fear in order to win support for repressive measures.

Andrea Coomber and Noor Khan write well about prison policy: “The cliff edge on which the prison system finds itself was not approached at speed, but one that we slowly but surely trudged towards.” They argue, unfashionably, that excessive punishment damages not only the individuals concerned, but also the fabric of society, and call for a reduction in the number of people in prison.

Vince Cable, like several other authors of these later chapters, looks to have been given more space. This may be out of deference to his standing or out of a belief in the importance of his subject of immigration. Vince writes very much with his economist’s fedora on, concluding that Enoch Powell was completely wrong about the social and political consequences of immigration, but that a rising population means we must face both our chronic inability to expand the housing stock sufficiently and our decaying infrastructure.

Ross Finnie takes us through Britain’s experience of federalism and looks at its possible future. He is billed as writing from a Scottish perspective, but much of what he has to say is relevant to England. How do we deal with this whale in the bathtub of British government? Ross is an enthusiast for devolving power to England’s regions, as Jo Grimond was before him, but it’s never been clear that the English share this enthusiasm. Still, as Ross points out, the idea has its English enthusiasts today.

David Howarth frames his proposals for constitutional reform as a way of easing Britain’s return to the European Union, or at least of making it possible. Since he wrote this chapter, events in the US have made us wonder how secure our present constitutional arrangements are. Would we have much defence against an executive that usurped powers that did not belong to it? You fear not, given Britain’s dependence upon the ‘good chap’ theory of government. We saw during Boris Johnson’s time at Number 10 what havoc someone who is not a good chap can wreak. As ever with David, his chapter is well worth reading.

Lawrence Freedman writes on Liberals and war, and those same events in the US make you wonder if his chapter should not have been placed first. Yet his conclusion holds: “After Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of Ukraine, there is less interest now in taking the military initiative in the name of liberal values and much more of a focus on the need to defend those values against aggressive states.”

And then Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood return to sum up the book’s arguments, quoting Wordsworth and William Morris as well as Mill.

Some will question the relevance of parts of When We Speak of Freedom – and I’m aware that those are probably the parts that appealed to me most. But I urge you to read this book. The Conservatives are showing us every day the gruesome fate that awaits a party that forgets its own history and its philosophy.

Layla Moran and Michael Meadowcroft on the Lib Dems and a progressive alliance

In Liberator 408 we’ve done something a bit different by running extended pieces by Layla Moran and Michael Meadowcroft on Liberal Democrat strategy. 

Layla argues for a progressive alliance with Labour and the Greens, while Michael calls for the party to make itself matter again across the widest area possible. 

See which (if either) you think is right.

Issue 408 of Liberator can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Michael Meadowcroft's Guardian obituary of Jonathan Fryer

The former Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft has written an obituary of Jonathan Fryer for the Guardian:

Jonathan Fryer, who has died aged 70 of a brain tumour, was a foreign correspondent and writer whose broadcasts from a total of 162 countries made his a familiar voice on BBC Radio. 

He also wrote about history and lectured on international politics, and spent more than half a century as a Liberal and later Liberal Democrat activist and candidate.

But the obituary is more than a list of achievements:

Jonathan was adopted at the age of 18 months by Rosemary and Harold Fryer. He had an exceptionally difficult childhood – his father, a Manchester businessman, sexually abused him. 

At primary school he fared badly, and his regimented early years at Manchester grammar school, studying subjects that he found uncongenial, led to failed examinations until one teacher fostered his interest in literature, geography and languages. He then won an open exhibition to St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, to study geography.

Forcing himself to be independent before he went to Oxford, Jonathan fulfilled his determination to get away from his father by travelling overland to Vietnam during the war there, partly funding his journey and stay by persuading Brian Redhead, then editor of the Manchester Evening News, to pay him for articles sent back to the paper. 

His experiences led him to switch to Oriental studies with Chinese and Japanese when he finally arrived at university.

Jonathan Fryer published an account of his childhood, Eccles Cakes: An Odd Tale of Survival, in 2016.

Michael Meadowcroft's Guardian obituary of Diana Maddock

Michael Meadowcroft has written an obituary of the Liberal Democrat peer Diana Maddock, who won a famous and unlikely by-election victory at Christchurch in 1993.

He writes:

Maddock ... had considerable organising ability and a great skill in recruiting party workers, as well as in persuading others to take on jobs. It was this proficiency that almost kept her in a backroom role rather than becoming the byelection candidate. 

Following the death of the Conservative MP for Christchurch, Robert Adley, in May 1993, the Conservative party moved the byelection writ almost immediately and Maddock was quickly engaged in telephoning potential candidates. 

However, a number of those she phoned told her that she ought to stand herself, and eventually, at the last minute, she contacted party headquarters to put her name forward.

My own favourite memory of Diana Maddock is of delivering Good Morning leaflets with her on polling day in the 1995 Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election.

Six of the Best 929

Michael Meadowcroft reviews the Lib Dems' election review.

Jeremy Farrar is interviewed about science, public policy and Covid-19: "In my view, the infection rates in the UK are too high, at least today, to reopen schools. Will that be different in two weeks' time when half term ends and schools are potentially open? It might be. But if the question was 'should we open schools today?' my answer would be 'no'."

"Tony had apparently - and fairly typically - spent a whole psychiatric career being labelled and drugged rather than offered the chance to look at his past. Until the very last moments of the programme, we saw him being offered exactly the same again, except this time it was further sanctioned by ‘leading experts’ in the field." Lucy Johnstone reviews What's the Matter with Tony Slattery?

Why don't we talk to children in care, asks social worker Andy Black.

Beware those who persecute in the name of principle, says Paul Russell.

Bee Wilson reviews a book on Gef, the talking mongoose who took up residence in a farmhouse on the Isle of Man in the early 1930s.

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Michael Meadowcroft points us to a short document on the principles of liberal democracy that he once helped Leeds Lib Dems draw up.

Natalie Bloomer is right to emphasise how the government's response to Covid-19 is putting the working class at much greater risk.

"All can now see that social care and our system of social support is worth much higher esteem; but how or whether we translate a new mood into a new system is uncertain." Alex Khaldi on social care after Covid-19.

Patrick Barkham explains how forest schooling is helping children from every background: "I assumed that most refugees have come to the UK from cities, but Wild Things has worked with many migrant children who grew up in rural areas. Meanwhile British-born city children belong to a country called Indoors."

"The guards are accustomed to such disturbances. But every so often a patrol encounters a noise, a flash of movement, or simply a sudden lurch in the pit of the stomach, that stops even hardened veterans in their tracks." Killian Fox meets the ghosts of the British Museum.

Richard Mabey introduces Richard Jefferies' Wildlife in a Southern County,

Six of the Best 765

Replying to the Michael Meadowcroft article included in the last of these round ups, Paul Holmes says a good targeting strategy is essential for the Liberal Democrats.

"Mainstream society has laid down with dogs and we have now got up with fleas." Matthew Collins says we have become comfortable with hate.

Hadley Freeman asks why actors are suddenly lining up to condemn Woody Allen: "I get why people feel icky about Allen. Some of us were rolling our eyes at Manhattan, his film about a man’s relationship with a schoolgirl, before the leading lights of #MeToo were born. But this is not a case that should be tried by public opinion."

Torie Bosch is fascinated by the "List of people who disappeared mysteriously" page on Wikipedia.

"The love Crook has for these characters shines through, and part of the joy of the show is in how likeable they are. Perhaps that’s why it’s accumulated such a strikingly devoted audience over the last couple of years." Anna Leszkiewicz analyses the appeal of Detectorists.

Tim Holyoake has some great pictures of the Derwent dams taken during a drought in 1959.

Six of the Best 764

"By definition, once we have no campaigning in a majority of seats our organisation atrophies and we lose the deliverers, canvassers and all the local workers in those seats. Then, at the following election, the number of workers available to go to target seats dwindles away and the strategy doesn’t even work for target seats." Michael Meadowcroft argues that targeting has mortally wounded the Liberal Democrats.

Frances Coppola explains how Carillion used a British government scheme to rip off its suppliers.

A lost opportunity? Rail Magazine on the closed March to Spalding line, which I travelled on as a student.

"The song has been endlessly analysed; it’s intentionally ambiguous and the meanings are still up for debate.  But let’s take a stab at it line by line." Yeoman Lowbrow has another look at Don McLean's American Pie.

James Dilley, an experimental archaeologist and specialist in European prehistory, has been to see Early Man - Aardman’s latest animated adventure

"Moondial taps into that area of the brain which operates purely on instinct and won't rest until every square inch of your body is covered in goosebumps." Curious British Telly celebrates the 1988 children's series.

Michael Meadowcroft's obituary of Bill Pitt

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Bill Pitt, who was Liberal MP for Croydon North-West between 1981 and 1983, died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 80.

He had fought the seat at three Seventies general elections, but 1981 was the dawn of the brief era of the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

So when the sitting Conservative member died it was widely expected that Pitt would step aside in favour of Shirley Williams.

But he insisted on fighting the by-election and won it.

As Michael Meadowcroft says in his Guardian obituary of Pitt:

Naturally the alliance made the most of Bill’s subsequent victory, claiming that if the alliance could win such an unprepossessing seat without a celebrity candidate such as Williams, it could win anywhere.

He also remembers Pitt's political career before his short spell in the limelight:

Bill was always a convivial and popular figure in the Liberal party, having joined in the 1960s after a few years in the Norwood Young Conservatives. He served on many party committees both regionally and nationally, and at one point edited the internal Liberal scandal sheet, Radical Bulletin. 

He polled creditably in Croydon North West in the two general elections of 1974 but lost his deposit at the 1979 contest. He did, however, more than double the Liberal vote in the 1981 Greater London council election covering the same area.

Why Liberal Democrat members should subscribe to Liberator

I have already posted Lord Bonkers' Diary from the current issue of Liberator and given you a taste of the party gossip to be found in Radical Bulletin.

But there is more to Liberator than that. As well as being the Liberal Democrats' Private Eye, it also aspires to be their New Statesman or Spectator.

You can download two articles from the new issue as pdfs.

There's Liz Barker's account of her attempts to address Tim Farron's line on gay sex. And there's Liberator's traditional questionnaire to party leadership contenders (even though there was only one contender this time).

Subscribers to the print magazine will also have read Tony Greaves, Michael Meadowcroft, Paul Hindley and others on Lib Dems' election result and Marianne Magnin on the French election.

The conclusion is clear. If you are a new (or old) Liberal Democrat you should subscribe to Liberator.

The battle for the footloose idealists

While I have Liberator 135, the issue that was sold at the Liberal Party's 1983 Assembly in Harrogate, on my desk, let me quote from an article that has surprising contemporary resonance.

This comes from an article by Michael Meadowcroft, the newly elected Liberal MP for Leeds West:

The task for Liberals is as it was in 1974 and in 1979 and was barely tackled. It is to win the battle for the hearts and minds of those thousands of concerned, worried, caring and potentially political individuals who exist up and down the land. 

These are the footloose idealists who reject the pessimism and the ruthlessness of the new Conservatism and who find it hard to stomach the authoritarian left and the impotent right of the Labour Party. 

They are the people who will commit themselves to some worthwhile cause and if we don't reach them they will just as easily end up in Friends of the Earth, the peace movement or the local community centre -worthy causes to be sure, but not with the potential of being able to confront Thatcherism and within a few years to have the cane to remove it from office. 

Win people with conviction and they will win others. Try to appeal directly to the crowd and the message is thereby diluted.

This still seems spot on to me, which is why the politics of the Transparency and Lobbying Bill have been so odd.

Take Tom Brake's first article on the subject for Liberal Democrat Voice. At its centre was an attack on 38 Degrees and told us to read an article by Chloe Smith if we wanted to know more.

38 Degrees can be irritating, but its supporters are just the sort of people that Michael Meadowcroft was talking about. For all their faults, they represent a more likely source of new Lib Dem activists than do people who take the word of Conservative ministers as gospel.

But 30 years ago we also had a telegenic leader who dreamt of appealing to over the heads of his activists to the voters.

I suppose the moral is still that you should subscribe to Liberator.

Book Review: A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club

You can find this review in today's Liberal Democrat News.


A Guide to the Works of Art of the National Liberal Club, London (second edition)
Michael Meadowcroft
National Liberal Club, 2011

Designed by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1887, the National Liberal Club is a work of art in itself. Gothic towers and pinnacles pierce the Whitehall sky: its wine cellar is formed from the remains of an attempt to build a railway under the Thames to Waterloo.

Between them are to be found portraits, busts and engravings that tell the story of the Club, of the Liberal Party and of British political radicalism in general. This elegant illustrated booklet by Michael Meadowcroft, the Club’s honorary librarian and a former MP for Leeds West, makes a fitting celebration of this collection. It is an expanded edition of one written by Veronica Herrington in 1997, and its indexes of artists and sitters make it easy to use. My only criticism is that the illustrations are not captioned.

Meadowcroft tells us that the art collection dates from the Club’s earliest days, when it was regularly offered busts and portraits (“more often than not of Mr Gladstone”). The result is a collection that is home to the Grand Old Man and to almost every prominent Liberal since. They range from wing-collared grandees of the party’s heyday to Paddy Ashdown, whose portrait is the only one to depict its subject in informal dress. (Among other recent Liberal leaders, Jo Grimond wears an academic gown over a suit and Sir David Steel appears to have chosen to be painted in the uniform of a Peruvian admiral.)

But the collection is not confined to Liberal leaders or even to Liberal members. There are portraits of radicals, such as William Cobbett and George Holyoake, who were never part of mainstream Liberalism but with whom the Club and its members were clearly in sympathy.

Perhaps high portraiture is less to modern taste, and in many ways the best painting in the book is a less formal study of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist MP for Northampton, by Walter Sickert. Paul Temple’s recent painting of Sir Cyril Smith gets beyond its subject’s bulk to find his character and there is a stunning portrait of the young Violet Bonham-Carter by Sir William Orpen, though this turns out to be a modern copy.

Meadowcroft does not record what became of Orpen’s original, but a significant number of works have been lost since the collection’s apogeé in 1940. One reason is the 1941 air raid that destroyed the Club’s famous staircase, though fortunately the finest paintings had been sent for safekeeping to the home of the Cornish Liberal Isaac Foot. (A portrait of Asquith was less fortunate in 1910: suffragettes scrawled ‘Votes for Women’ across it in purple ink.)

Through all these vicissitudes the National Liberal Club remained more than an art gallery: it functioned as an important hub for Liberalism when the party was at its lowest ebb. In 1948 Sir John Simon, an eminent National Liberal and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to resign after speaking for the Conservative candidate in a by-election.

A further reminder of those days comes in the form of an illuminated address presented by the Club to Harry Willcock. Willcock, a Liberal parliamentary candidate, had refused to produce his identity card when stopped by the police in 1950. His actions led to abolition of identity cards two years later.

This address may be the least important item in the collection from an artistic point of view, but it is priceless from a political one.

Michael Meadowcroft provides more reasons why the Lib Dems should stop calling for referendums on Europe

The former Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft emails in response to my Liberal Democrat News article saying the party should stop calling for referendums on Europe.

He provides two more arguments in support of my case:

The public votes in a referendum far more on its current perception of the popularity of the government or leader proposing it. That was true in the UK referendum on AV last May where it was more of a vote on whether or not one liked Nick Clegg than on the benefits or otherwise of AV. Equally the French voted "No" on the European constitution on 29 May 2005 when Chirac's unpopularity was at 66% in the polls.

Also, the turnout at referenda in the UK is invariably lower than at the comparable general election. The public may well demand a referendum - and who wouldn't - but they don't bother to vote in them! The vote at the 2010 General Election was 65.1% but at the AV referendum it was only 42.2%.

You can read more from Michael on this subject in an old Yorkshire Post article of his that he reproduces on his own website.

Sadly, it also reveals that Michael and I find ourselves on opposite sides of a far more rancorous debate - that over the correct plural of "referendum".

The significance of Cyril Smith

Numerous tributes have been paid to Cyril Smith since his death was announced yesterday.

In a comment on Liberal Democrat Voice, Chris Rennard reminds us of his importance to the Liberal Party in the early 1970s:

Cyril Smith was one of only four Liberal candidates who increased their share of the vote substantially in the 1970 General Election. All four of those candidates (the others were Ronnie Fearn, Cyril Carr and Wallace Lawler) were popular local Councillors who were effective community campaigners. Their relative successes helped to give me and others some of our inspiration for how an electorally successful Liberal Party might be created.

When the Rochdale by-election occurred in September 1972, the Liberal Party had only six MPs (three in Scotland, one in Wales, one in Cornwall and one in Devon). When Cyril Smith won it, he became the only Liberal MP in England apart from John Pardoe in N Cornwall and Jeremy Thorpe in N Devon.

Cyril’s victory in the by-election began the the Liberal Party revival of the early 70s. His agent John Spiller was one of my many mentors in the party. John made sure that Cyril wrote a personal note to everyone that he knew in the constituency inviting them to his adoption meeting and inviting them to be an official signatory on his nomination paper – more than 5,000 people signed them.

The September Rochdale by-election win helped provide momentum and belief that Graham Tope could win Sutton and Cheam in the December by-election (masterminded by another of my mentors – Liverpool’s Trevor Jones and organised again by John Spiller. The community based campaigning approach from these campaigns (by now being spread by pioneers in places such as Pendle and LB Richmond) led to widespread Liberal gains in the 1973 local elections (inc control of Liverpool), two more parliamentary by-election gains that Summer and 29% in the national opinion polls that Summer.

Cyril’s contribution to the survival and recovery of the party in this very difficult period following the debacle of the 1970 General Election was therefore immense.

I heard Cyril Smith address a public meeting in Sutton Coldfield in 1982 and he was a terrific speaker. His style of oratory, which no doubt came from Nonconformist preaching, now seems a world away from today's culture of soundbites and glottal stops.

Because of his vast size, people expected Smith to be an uncomplicatedly jolly person, but he was always a more complex and difficult person than that. In a tribute I quoted yesterday, Sandy Walkington suggested:

Cyril’s tragedy was that his weight made him a figure of fun when he was in fact a shrewd and insightful politician who never got the recognition he deserved.

That feeling imbues the obituary by Michael Meadowcroft that appeared in this morning's Guardian. Anyone who was around in the party in those days will know that there was never much love lost between these two, and Meadowcroft is honest about Cyril Smith's shortcomings as a colleague and his sometimes unattractive views.

But his summing up is fair and reflects the ultimate sadness of Smith's career:

His success in transcending the disadvantages of his birth without acquiring any airs and graces, and without in any way abandoning his roots, seemed nevertheless to leave him with a curious inferiority complex.

Perhaps his most revealing comment was made in 1985: "I don't believe that I have ever been acceptable to the Liberal party establishment. I was handy to trot out to attack the Labour vote because I was working class."

Actually, such a complex is common among those born into extreme poverty and often with good reason. I suspect the largely public-school Liberal establishment of the day did rather look down on Smith.

Nor should we modern secularists forget the important role that religion once played in our national life. Because I remember from reading his autobiography that one of the reasons that Smith felt he was despised is that he was a Unitarian - the most free-thinking of the Nonconformist churches. In his days as a teacher, some found it positively shocking

In Leicester, by contrast, the Unitarians were wholly respectable and provided many of the city's Liberal mayors in the 19th century.

Michael Meadowcroft learns the nature of local radio

Martin Kelner has a piece in the Guardian Media section today that mentions his time in local radio. He remembers presenting an evening show for several northern local radio stations that combined news and sport:

My guest was the former Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft, newly returned from former Yugoslavia, where he had been advising on how democracy could be brought to the region.

Alongside my conversation with Meadowcroft, I was to take regular reports from numerous midweek football matches across the north. While I was lining up the football reports, I half-listened to the internationally renowned expert on democracy explaining how unstable the situation is in the Balkans, and how it was essential for the future of Europe that a lasting peace was achieved.

"The Balkans," he said, "is where the flame was lit that ignited the Great War, and it is no exaggeration to say that if we do not get this right, it could lead to a confrontation from which the world might not recover."

To which I responded with the immortal words: "I'm afraid I'm going to have to interrupt you there, there's been a goal at Chesterfield."

House Points: Europe and boundaries

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News - perhaps not my most inspired effort.

I heard Michael Meadowcroft tell the Berehovo story at a Liberator fringe meeting at Lib Dem Conference a couple of years ago. On his own website Michael credits it to the late Rabbi Hugo Gryn.

No boundaries

Gordon Brown was back from Lisbon on Monday, waving his red lines. Cheered on by the Tory benches, David Cameron demanded a referendum on the reform treaty. His party is feeling happier, but that's largely because it has reverted to the agenda that lost it the last three elections.

This will give whoever wins the Liberal Democrat leadership contest - and House Points in scrupulously neutral - a terrific opportunity.

It fell to Vince Cable to lead for us. And for the first time our demand for a referendum on our continued membership of the European Union made sense to me.

Vince said much has changed since Harold Wilson's referendum of 1975. There has been the Single European Act, the Maastricht treaty, the Amsterdam and Nice treaties, and now this one. "The time has come for consultation with the British public on the cumulative effect of those treaties, because there is anxiety about national sovereignty, and that has to be addressed through public debate."

But the danger is that such a referendum would be about the past. If it were won - and it would probably be won by scaring voters about the economic consequences of withdrawal - it would only give retrospective approval to those treaties. The first time something new came up, we would be back to square one.

It would be backward-looking for the Lib Dems too. For decades, it was congratulating ourselves on our foresight in backing the Common Market that kept up our morale. But Europe is a more complex issue these days.

Michael Meadowcroft is fond of using a story about a peasant from the village of Berehovo to show how arbitrary national boundaries are. The peasant says: "I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, educated in Czechoslovakia, started work in Hungary and was for a time in Germany, spent most of my adult life in the Soviet Union and now I am retired in the Ukrainian Republic." His companion says, "You must have done a lot of travelling." "Not at all," replies the peasant, "I never left Berehovo."

But the boundaries of Europe are arbitrary too. When we debate whether Turkey should join the EU, we find there are no simple answers any more.