"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
"Watching him involved engaging a kind of cognitive dissonance: this desperate, thin man was the same person as a sweet 6-year-old saying he wanted to learn about the moon; a handsome 20-year-old studying Physics in Oxford flirting with the camera; a 48-year-old who had realised that the research he was still passionate about had hit a dead end." Jude Rogers on 70 Up.
Ferdinand Mount has no truck with the idea that Britain has always welcomed refugees: "The usual narrative of the Peasants' Revolt describes John Ball and Wat Tyler's march to London, Ball's sermon at Blackheath ('When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?') and the brave conduct of the young Richard II. We don’t often hear about the massacre of the Flemings in Cheapside on 14 June, though it was at the heart of the revolt and an episode of frenzied violence. According to a contemporary chronicle, the rebels 'beheaded without judgment or trial all the Flemings they found, so that mounds of corpses were to be seen in the streets'."
Norman Baker looks at why politicians deny climate change and champion fossil fuels.
"The more I encountered these stories where political and emotional commitments seemed irreconcilable, the more I began to ask: what was life like for those who found themselves inescapably drawn to someone they shouldn’t be?" Alison Garden leads a project building an archive of oral histories documenting mixed marriage in Ireland.
"If you believe he was an imposter, then you believe he was the son of a “boatman” from Tournai, forced to play the role of Richard, Duke of York. If you believe he was Richard, Duke of York, then he was actually the rightful heir to the English throne." Sophie Bacchus-Waterman is writing a biography of Perkin Warbeck.
Animation Obsessive takes us behind the scenes of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon 'What's Opera, Doc?': "At a cost of $35,510 (almost $430,000 today), it was spendier than most Warner cartoons. It took seven weeks compared to the standard five. To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards."
Two former Liberal Democrat MPs – Norman Baker (Lewes, 1997-2015) and Duncan Hames (Chippenham, 2010-15) – talk about the growth of corruption in the British political system.
Duncan Hames is now the director of policy at Transparency International UK and is married to the former Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson.
Norman Baker writes of this conversation on YouTube:
The UK has now slipped to 20th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a sharp fall from just outside the top ten as recently as 2021, and is sitting at its lowest ever score since the Index was revamped in 2012.
Duncan makes the point that one of the reasons for the rise in the perception of corruption in the UK is the sense of impunity that some figures felt. It is notable and worrying that we have only found out about the shenanigans of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor through the release of the Epstein Files in the United States.
Meanwhile, the revelation that Nigel Farage personally received £5 million from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, money he claims he had no obligation to declare on the grounds it was “purely private” and “wasn’t political in any sense at all,” is precisely the kind of story that illustrates why transparency in public life matters so much.
As Duncan and I discussed, the absence of proper accountability has real consequences for ordinary people, from the billions squandered on dodgy PPE contracts during the pandemic, to the way in which unchecked lobbying allows vested interests to bend government policy to their will.
Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."
"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.
Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.
Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."
"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).
"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.
The former Liberal Democrat MP and minister talks about the subject mattere of his recent book on the opaque financial arrangements of the Royal Family.
Back in the day, Norman Baker was my favourite Liberal Democrat MP. So it's good to see he's alive and kicking, even if his lens could do with a clean.
There's a lot to be said for a constitutional monarchy, but Norman makes a good case that there's a need for ours to be funded with less secrecy and a clearer sense of what belongs to the royal family and what belongs to the nation.
The title of his new book – Royal Mint, National Debt -– is drawn from an observation of William Cobbett's:
You can tell a lot about a country which refers to the Royal Mint and the National Debt.
Andrew Lownie is the author of a recent book on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (as he now is). Before he turned his attention to the royal family, Lownie wrote about Britain's intelligence services. He says he found them much more cooperative than he has the royals.
In what Mark Perryman on Labour Hub calls "a sorry tale of hypocrisy and snitching", two members of Labour's constituency party in Lewes have been expelled for advocating a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats there in last year's general election.
The Lewes seat, which was held by Norman Baker between 1997 and 2015, was recaptured from the Tories last year by James MacCleary.
Perryman calls it hypocrisy because:
Labour publicly identified Lewes as a ‘non battleground’ seat .... The candidate and his team were instructed to minimise campaigning; instead they were sent to seats where Labour could win. Which party precisely did they think this would benefit?
And the snitching?
The 2024 tactical voting campaign in Lewes was organised by the local Lewes Compass Group. Compass nationally, despite, its very public support for tactical voting, is not a Labour Party-proscribed organisation.
It is cross-party, yet at its core are a whole host of Labour members, including councillors. At least three Cabinet members I can think of have spoken on Compass platforms.
The local campaign went beyond what is permitted under Labour rules. I have never displayed a poster advocating a vote for any party other than Labour ....
But not everyone is as tuned in to navigating the Labour rule book as me. Our ‘snitch’ didn’t have the good sense to give a friendly piece of advice to his or her fellow members that they were breaking Party rules. Instead they were busy compiling their evidence to secure expulsions.
Nobody has ever owned up to this cowardly behaviour, so in our local Labour Party we have a snitch entirely unwilling to justify their actions politically.
Labour List also has the story - apparently Clause I.5.B.vi of the Labour Party Rule Book is the one you have to watch out for.
I voted Labour in Harborough, Oadby and Wigston last year. That was partly from a slim hope that they might defeat our very online and increasingly radicalised Conservative MP.
But it was more from a feeling that it was hypocritical of me to be so keen that Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats in places like Lewes if I wasn't prepared to reciprocate myself.
Norman Lamb has been interviewed by the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series.
You can see a short clip from it above and read the full transcript on the IfG website. (The interview took place in March 2020.)
As the Liberal Democrats could find themselves part of a coalition government after the next election, it's important that we learn from our unhappy experience between 2010 and 2015. So this interview makes useful reading.
But it may not make happy reading for Danny Alexander, who does not come out of it well.
Here, for instance, is Norman Lamb talking about his role as Nick Clegg's parliamentary private secretary, which he took on after the offer of a ministerial role was clumsily withdrawn:
I found it to be a fairly hollow role. I was involved in central discussions and I became part of the core team around Nick, but I was also conscious that the power lay with Nick and Danny - Nick primarily went to Danny and not anyone else - which caused, I think, some frustration amongst many people. A lot of people felt that Danny wasn't necessarily the best influence on Nick, and I still feel that strongly.
And when asked by the interviewer to expand on this point, Lamb says:
I think that Danny was hopeless on the health reforms, he passed it all and didn’t really understand the issues, in my view. In my view, the great sadness was David Laws falling early as the chief secretary .... The caricature of David was as right wing, as a sort of Tory in disguise, but actually, internally, he wasn’t. He was the one who was fighting against ending the indexing of benefits, he was fighting for a real terms increase in education spend and a real value to the pupil premium.
His fall from the Treasury meant that we lost an intellectually coherent Liberal in the Treasury. We ended up with someone who was trying to convince Tories that he could be trusted doing this vital role of chief secretary to the Treasury. It was a case of overcompensating, which you quite often see.
That overcompensation was pretty much official Liberal Democrat strategy after 2010 - you can learn that from an article written by Nick Clegg's then political adviser, Richard Reeves, in 2012.
Reeves thought the Liberal Democrats had first to prove they were mature enough to be in government, but it is hard to imagine any other party burdening itself with this demand when it had just won a share of power through the ballot box.
A better model, Norman Lamb suggests, was that offered by Norman Baker as a transport minister. Lamb recalls that Philip Hammond (then the transport secretary) complaining to him that Baker was difficult to work with and did not comply with the protocols:
Norman, who I’ve got a lot of time for, was a press junkie who was just going off and actually doing what he ought to be doing, I think getting the message out there about what a Lib Dem minister was achieving.
Lamb goes on to add:
The interesting thing was that the two of them ended up getting on quite well in transport and having a degree of mutual respect, I think because they were both assiduous - I think the dynamic ended up working quite well.
So next time we Liberal Democrats find ourselves in coalition, we need to have more confidence in ourselves and in the approach to the country's problems that we have just fought an election on.
And we need to make sure we have someone at the treasury with the intellectual equipment and confidence to stand up for themselves.
In 2010 our front bench had as much expertise on economics, if not more, as those of the two larger parties. Think Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Steve Webb. We should have drawn on that pool of talent and used Danny Alexander's talents differently.
Anne Applebaum explains why the West’s diplomacy with Russia keeps failing.
"If you are repeatedly saying racist things, standing in front of racist posters and devoting your entire political career to a racist agenda, then the question of whether you are a racist 'at heart' seems somewhat irrelevant." Adam Bienkov on Michael Crick's biography of Nigel Farage and the taboo on calling racist politicians racist.
Social Work Shorts listens to Lucy Johnstone critique the current professional and public perception of mental health: "She started by quoting Dr Allen Francis the chair of the DSM IV Committee (the mental health diagnostic manual) as saying ‘there is no definition of a mental disorder ….it’s bullshit.’ Johnstone was keen to point out in saying this and the other things she said she wasn’t denying the very real and problematic experiences that people have. She was simply suggesting that we are approaching it in the wrong way"
"If you want to be confident of getting the best ticket deal on Britain’s railway you need to interrogate both the ticket machine and the ticket office to be sure you are getting the cheapest fare, as both offer different ticket prices. And that’s before looking online and maybe being offered more options, including ones where you pay an additional commission to the likes of Trainline." Roger French explores the crazy world of rail ticketing.
Norman Baker, meanwhile, gets all nostalgic about public transport in 1973.
"It’s a highly ambiguous snapshot of [Andy] Partridge’s relationship with his country. It’s a hiding-in-plain-sight masterpiece that, for reasons which will become apparent in this article, remains on the outside of popular consciousness. It’s also a grand folly, specifically designed to dig Partridge out of a particularly messy hole." Fergal Kinney marks the 40th anniversary of XTC''s English Settlement.
The former Liberal Democrat transport minister Norman Baker turned up in an item on rural bus services on Farming Today last week - the item starts at 6:05.
Now the adviser to the Campaign for Better Transport, Norman calls for a reform of the funding of bus services to prevent further cuts.
"The by-election team included Candy Piercy handling the media, Norman Baker (then a Lewes councillor) doing casework, John Ricketts in charge of direct mail, and Paul Burstow (then a staffer for the association of Lib Dem councillors) in charge of leaflets. One such leaflet gleefully pointed out that a hospital listed by the Conservatives’ media guide had just been demolished." Tides of History looks back at the Eastbourne by-election of 1990, where David Belotti's victory hastened the end of Margaret Thatcher's reign.
"Our national parks could be beacons of hope for natural climate solutions - brimming with native broadleaf woodlands, agroforestry, restored peat bogs and species-rich grassland." Danny Gross writes a briefing for Friends of the Earth.
Adam Kirsch reviews The Murder of Professor Schlick, David Edmonds' new book on the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who operated in the shadow of the rise of Nazism.
The antics in post-war Nordic children’s books - think the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking - left propaganda and prudery behind. Richard W. Orange says we need this madcap spirit more than ever.
"There’s definitely an undercurrent of class tension throughout the movie, a sense of knowing your place, even in a new town. See how Jamie feels out of place at the upper class gatherings and how uncomfortable he (and his mother) look when doctor’s daughter Mary comes to tea. The sixties was supposed to be the decade when the class system came crashing down. But even in a new town, everyone knew their level." Mod Culture reviews the 1968 film Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which is being shown on Sony Movies Action (Freeview channel 40) late tomorrow night.
Ed Davey has pulled out of the Radical Association hustings because James Baillie was to chair it: "I hope sincerely that this conduct by Ed’s campaign has been a one-off which they will on reflection agree was not up to the standards to which they would wish to hold themselves, and is not representative of their wider attitude to my fellow party activists." Later. See this post for subsequent developments.
Chris Grey surveys the latest developments in the disaster that is Brexit: "Brexit has in effect declared culture war on Britain’s middle-class - or at least the most productive, active parts of it. It’s that which is leading skilled people to leave or to withdraw from public life. Yet at the same time it is they who are charged with actually dealing with Brexit since, of course, most of them are not in a position to emigrate or resign."
Rachel Lance explains the science of the Beirut explosion.
"Cardiff’s Chief Constable David Williams campaigned in 1918 to stop black men from playing cricket. He was concerned that 'white flannels are more revealing than corduroys and make black men more attractive to white girls'." Chris Sullivan on the extraordinary history of Tiger Bay.
Widening the A27 through Sussex would be 'billion-pound vandalism', says Norman Baker.
Harrow Online discovers the place of the Railway Hotel by Harrow and Wealdstone station in music history and in that of The Who in particular.
Alwyn Turner's masterly survey of the UK singles charts of my early teenage years for Lion & Unicorn has reached March 1975.
One of the top ten in the week he chooses was Pick Up the Pieces by the Average White Band. Alwsyn rightly describes them as "Britain’s best-ever funk band".
When I chose Pick Up the Pieces as one of my Sunday music videos I repeated some lines from Norman Baker's Against the Grain where he remembered an unsuccessful gig by his band The Reform Club:
As well as members of the band, we had roped in Archy Kirkwood, the Lib Dem MP for Roxburgh and Berwickshire, on guitar, and Chris Berry, our Eastbourne candidate, on keyboards.
Archy was a competent rhythm guitarist and had been in a Scottish band in the 1960s, half of which went on to be the Average White Band, though not Archy's half.
This morning I sent the link to this post to Alwyn, and of course he knows more than I do.
It turns out Archy was a member of a band called The Kingpins and only one of its members, Onnie McIntyre, later joined the Average White Band.
Googling The Kingpins does not get you far, but it does lead you to the site of another band member, Lex Gibson, and reveals that this history got scrambled so there was once a rumour that Archy had been in the Average White Band himself.
My own first involvement with Archy Kirkwood was at my first Liberal Assembly at Bournemouth in 1984.
This was the era of big debates on nuclear weapons and we radicals wanted people with clout on the platform so they would be seen voting against David Steel's support for cruise missiles.
So I got there early and took a seat on the platform, only to give it up to Archy just before the debate began.
a provocative and hard-hitting analysis of the royal family, exposing its extravagant use of public money and the highly dubious behaviour of some among its ranks, while remaining critical of the knee-jerk sycophancy shown by press and politicians alike.
It also reminds us that Norman is a privy counsellor.
Lewes District Council, after 8 years of Conservative leadership, is now controlled by a Co-operative Alliance of councillors from the Green, Liberal Democrat, and Labour parties plus two Independents....
Liberal Democrat Councillor, James MacCleary and Labour Councillor Chris Collier proposed the new Leader of Lewes District Council, Councillor Zoe Nicholson, leader of the Green Party group in a move to take control of the council.
The Alliance voted unanimously for the new leadership arrangements with Councillor James MacCleary, leader of the Liberal Democrat group, as Deputy Leader.
The Alliance has an overall majority on the councillors and is the result of joint working that has been ongoing since the local elections in May.
The Alliance will operate on a shared leadership arrangement with the Green Party and Liberal Democrats rotating the leadership annually.
As readers of Liberator or Norman Baker's memoirs will know, Lewes Lib Dems do not always agree amongst themselves.
And in May they contrived to lose three seats when we were winning them in fistfuls on other councils across the South of England.
So let's hope this alliance proves a success and helps us towards making Lewes a Lib Dem gain at the next general election.
Norman Baker was my favourite Liberal Democrat MP of the party's glory years. He was a powerful campaigner, friendly and with enough quirkiness to be a true Liberal. And he had a talent for getting up the noses of all the right people.
Looking back on the death of David Kelly in 2003, it does remarkable that no inquest was held into his death. Instead, it was bundled up with Lord Hutton's inquiry into "the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".
Those circumstances where expanded to include the intelligence reports the Blair government used to justify war in Iraq and the BBC's reporting of them. Poor Dr Kelly faded into the background.
If you watch it you will find that Norman's conclusion is that David Kelly was murdered. Not by the British deep state, as some like to imagine, but by the Iraqis.
Given what we now know about Russian operations in Britain, this is not far fetched.
We should be worrying that the British authorities still seem remarkably relaxed about the number of people who have crossed Putin who keel over and die on our shores.
Anyway, a few years after recording this, Norman became a Home Office minister. It's a funny old world.
The former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has written a piece on the departure of Boris Johnson for iNews.
When he was a transport minister Norman saw Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, close up.
I think it is fair to say he was not impressed:
He spent time and money on a white elephant Boris Island airport that was never going to fly. He promoted a garden bridge that has been torn to shreds by the Public Accounts Committee.
He introduced at vast cost a huge fleet of new Routemasters with open platforms and conductors, only to withdraw all the conductors and keep the doors shut. He gave us a cable car crossing at Greenwich that is a huge drain on the public finances.
And he bought water cannon vehicles from Germany in an attempt to bounce the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, into allowing them on London’s streets, and when she resisted, he went behind her back to David Cameron. Quite rightly, she told him where to get off.
He had a habit of running straight to the Prime Minister of the Chancellor to get his way, ignoring successive Transport Secretaries. He was politically highly partisan in a way that was out of line with the coalition, refusing to engage with Lib Dem ministers even where we could be helpful to him.
And behind that bonhomie, he was lazy and petulant. That a lot went right was down to his inheritance from Ken Livingstone, and the highly competent Peter Hendy at his right-hand side. What worked did so in spite of Boris, not because of him.
Just ten months after joining the Big Lemon, former Lewes MP Norman Baker is off to pursue a range of other interests including journalism, a music album and a top secret new book.
Mr Baker joined the Brighton bus company in March last year, and says he has already achieved what he set out to do there.
This includes winning new contracts, doubling the size of the team, helping launch the UK’s first solar-powered electric bus and winning Most Sustainable Business at the Sussex Business Awards.
It all sounds amicable as the website quotes the Big Lemon's founder and chief executive Tom Druitt:
“He has taken the organisation to the next level and we now have the opportunity to grow our impact far beyond what was previously possible. I wish Norman all the very best of luck in his future endeavours.”
Now Angel Air announces that his first solo album will be released early in April:
"Staying Blue" is his first solo effort and is an eclectic mix of blues, country, jazz and folk songs.
The album’s opening track is “Shipping Forecast” with a wonderful blend of folk/sea shanty. Norman can write a song and sing the heck out of it. This album showcases elite musicianship and really enjoyable songwriting.
