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James Ball argues that Labour's social media ban for teenagers is an admission of total and utter failure to govern online spaces: "The UK government has lots of powers to govern the internet that it simply isn’t using. Hosting images of child abuse is a strict liability offence, one that Elon Musk’s X platform blatantly breached with its Grok chatbot. The government gave itself extensive powers to regulate social platforms under the Online Safety Act, which it has never even made an attempt to enforce."

"This week contained two stories, which dominated the headlines. One took place on the streets of Belfast, the other in the hallways of Whitehall. One concerned race riots and the other a defence funding plan. But they were in fact the same story. They both concerned security – one at home, the other abroad. And they were both the result of a prime minister who refuses to lead." Ian Dunt says Keir Starmer's inertia threatens national security.

Anja Krstic and Ivona Hideg find that men's careers benefit when they take parental leave but women’s do not.

"Ten years on from the referendum, the tired stereotype of the 'Northern Brexit voter' is one we should retire." J.P. Spencer has the figures that explode a widespread myth.

"Undoubtedly the most important members of the audience were a group of families from formerly occupied territories affected by the abductions: mothers with teenagers they had recovered from Crimea or elsewhere; families who were still trying to get their children back." Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk on the Kyiv premiere of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers.

Kenneth George Godwin finds innocence and corruption in the films of Alexander Mackendrick: "The clearest expression of Mackendrick’s worldview is perhaps apparent in the three films he made which centred on children: Mandy (1952), Sammy Going South (1963), and A High Wind In Jamaica (1965). Unsentimental, unafraid of the darkness kids face in a harsh world, unafraid to see the potential for darkness in the kids themselves … these are three of the most adult films about children ever made."

Martin Stephens remember making The Innocents (1961)

It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film. 

He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.

I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...

I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me.  Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed. 

One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job.  I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.

And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

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Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

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"There was little to no interaction between the three groupings at conference. The main hall hosted debates that were stitched up months ago, when the delegate line-up was elected, and the fringe events largely confirmed prejudices, instead of challenging them. 'This is why we were right all along,' was the lesson learned by all three groups." Seth Thévoz argues that Labour is split into irreconcilable factions.

Leo Litra and Gabrielė Valodskaitė say the success of Maia Sandu’s pro-EU party in Moldova’s parliamentary election holds three valuable lessons for protecting votes from Russian meddling in the future – whether in Moldova or in other vulnerable democracies.

"The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder and recently released in the UK, is a documentary about the crackdown on American school libraries that began in 2021 in Texas and soon spread to other states. Ordered to remove 850 books from their shelves ... several librarians resisted. Some were fired; some received death threats." Anna Aslanyan on the battle against censorship.

Kenan Malik reviews a new book that challenges accepted views of the appeal of the arts: "Today, much of that working-class culture has not just slipped away but also been lost to memory. It is partly the result of the changing relationship between the state and the arts. Thatcherite free market ideology of the 1980s combined with New Labour’s stress on 'social impact' both to commodify the arts and to instrumentalise it – the worth of any work of art lay not in the work itself but in its capacity to promote economic growth, .urban regeneration and, most importantly, 'social inclusion”."

Natasha A. Fraser looks back on the cinematic legacy of her stepfather, Harold Pinter. She remembers his understanding of actors, the yellow legal pads he wrote his scripts on, his Hollywood flirtations and disdain for the clutter of Academy correspondence.

"It would have been fascinating to see where Tey's pen and her ingenious mind would have taken her. As it stands, a headline from the Scots newspaper, The Herald, from 2022 rather seems to sum it up: 'Josephine Tey,' it declared, 'the best crime writer you’ve never heard of'. Quite possibly. And it’s high time that changed." Alec Marsh champions the forgotten queen of crime fiction.

Michael Crawford paints a picture of the young David Hemmings

This blog's hero David Hemmings first made his name as a singer, being the first boy to play Miles in Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

One of the boys he beat to the role was Michael Ingram, who is known to us as Michael Crawford. Later, they were to alternate the role of Sammy in an English Opera Group tour of Britten's Let's Make an Opera.

In his memoirs Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String, Crawford paints a picture of Hemmings in those days:

David Hemmings ... was more precocious, and far more adventurous than I would ever have dreamt of being. When I was fourteen, David was fourteen going on 30! He was always disappearing into the bathroom with his girlfriend: I imagined that they were 'doing it', but I didn't have the faintest idea what 'doing' it entailed. David was a gentleman, never indulging in locker-room confidences. Still, we all knew that whatever it was he and his girl were doing behind the bathroom door, you could bet your life that she'd emerge with a smile on her face.

In fact David would arrive anywhere as if he had just come from doing it. He had a rolling gait like Robert Mitchum's in Build My Gallows High, and had the upturned collar too. His voice was always a little deeper than mine: he sounded as though he'd been smoking from birth. 'I think it's bloody,' he'd say. It was his favourite phrase - he said it about everything. It's difficult to appreciate just how cool that phrase sounded. He was everything I wanted to be. 

Whenever there was a woman around he was there first. And what a dancer! I remember he moved his hips a lot inside his very sharp trousers. David was doing the lambada before anyone ever thought of it. I admired him enormously. Looking back now, I think David was in the process of re-inventing himself - he was standing outside himself, trying on new personalities for size, tongue in cheek all the while.

At the end of the tour I was sent back to Oakfield kicking and screaming all the way. Predictably, I returned to the classroom as David Hemmings, swaggering in, collar turned up. First period of the day: geography. Mr Steele addresses the class. 'The Suez Crisis - what are we to make of it?'

From the back of the class I offer, 'I just think it's bloody'. My classmates turn away, sniggering loudly.

'It's bloody alright', Mr Steele agrees: 'Get out!'

Interestingly, one of Hemmings' obituaries said he seemed to be playing a different role - actor, business tycoon, director - every time you met him.

Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

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Nick Cohen criticises collaborationist journalism: "Instead of a robust defence of democratic debate, we have had writers for the Financial Times opining that: 'A time will come when politicians can tell voters that Brexit was a turkey of an idea, that it makes Britain poorer than it needs to be, that it doesn’t even work as an immigration-cutting retreat from the world. That time isn’t far off. But it isn’t now.' The job of the collaborator here is not to ask hard questions but to police debate by saying that hard questions, or indeed any questions, are an inopportune tactic."

"While it's easy to dismiss something as amorphous as an improvement in quality of life, the dramatic reduction in traffic fatalities makes a stark case for what is often initially an unpopular measure. In Graz the number of accidents leading to serious injuries has dropped by 24 percent, despite an increase in the number of residents and traffic volume." Kaja Šeruga on moves to reduce the speed of traffic in many European cities.

"The state of our county courts has a direct and profound effect on the daily lives of millions of people. It is not just worthy to include it in manifestos but a potential vote-winner." John Hyde asks why the state of civil justice isn't an election issue.

Hugh Morris on how the Chair of Arts Council England threatened to cut £3.2 million of Welsh National Opera funding after music director Tomáš Hanus spoke out about the company’s financial difficulties.

Popular television programmes and general elections sometimes collide. Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey investigate.

Balladeer's Blog reads After London by Richard Jefferies: "The Thames and Severn Rivers have backed up, forming a large central lake in England. What was once London is a toxic marsh so deadly to human life that its gases and vapors, when carried by the winds, kill or drive mad humans exposed to them."

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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.

John Rutter sang on the first recording of Britten's War Requiem

I can remember singing Old Abram Brown at school, but the first time I made a point of listening to one of Benjamin Britten's works I was in my early twenties. I had just read The Turn of the Screw and Radio Three was broadcasting the opera Britten made from it.

I found the music difficult, but interesting enough that I wanted to hear again.

Britten is now one of my very favourite composers, up there with Bach and Schubert. And the first of his works that I really got to understand was the War Requiem. I loved everything about it, even the austere black-and-white Decca box that the records came in.

Today, the 110th anniversary of Britten's birth, I came across this pleasing piece of trivia. The composer John Rutter sang on that Decca recording of the War Requiem as a member of the choir of Highgate School.

There is a fascinating video on YouTube in which you can hear Britten rehearsing the soloists, orchestra and choirs before that recording was made.

Here is a short and amusing clip from it. (If you follow the link to YouTube, you can listen to the whole thing.)

Mika: Grace Kelly

Why does Britain do so badly in Eurovision these days? The Iraq War? Brexit? Or is it because we pick weak songs and give them to performers who lack experience? My money's on the last of these.

I chose Grace Kelly for reasons of trivia: a number of sources suggest that the little girl sitting on the piano is Mae Muller, who grew up to finish last but one in this year's contest.

But then I got to wondering why we can't have a Eurovision entry as good as this song. The singer was even part of the presenting team when it was held in Italy last year.

Mika - real name Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr - has a cosmopolitan background, but he lived in London as a teenager and attended Westminster School. He also sang as a boy with the Royal Opera at Covent Garden.

An expensive private education new seems a prerequisite of a career in music. Those who - rightly - are concerned about this point to the decline of music teaching in schools.

But one thing I notice from the biographies of the stars of the Sixties is how many of them had sung in church choirs as boys and got their musical education doing so.

Another common influence was that many of them had fathers who played in jazz bands, which meant they grew up with Black American music and understood the blues, which became the basis of British music in that golden age.

But now most of the church choirs and jazz bands have gone, which may be another reason why we do so badly in Eurovision these days.

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"The row over LTNs isn’t a culture war, it’s a microcosm of a much more fundamental question. How does a society built on fossil fuels shift its behaviour quickly enough to have an impact on the looming climate change catastrophe? It’s a question that’s not going to go away." Flip Chart Fairy Tales on the outcry over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

James Ball says the government's online safety bill will annoy voters and may lead to messaging apps withdrawing their apps from the UK.

Norman Lebrecht argues that Arts Council hostility has added to the problems caused for opera by Covid and Brexit: "A climate of hostility towards opera was created. A state of siege set in and confidence sank. In mass media, opera was once again presented as a pastime for the privileged." 

Sixteen-year-old Jack Cornwell, who died after being wounded at the Battle of Jutland, was posthumously awarded the VC. Alex Churchill finds that his decoration was the result of newspaper clamour for a hero after the losses at Jutland and that the photograph of Cornwall that was used everywhere was actually of one of his brothers, because no photograph of him existed.

Richard Luck thinks The Day of the Jackal is an assassination movie without equal.

Think of Benjamin Britten and you think of Suffolk, but John Finn takes us to he several Islington houses where he and Peter Pears lived when they had to be in London.

Why everybody loves Pat Nevin

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I love Pat Nevin. I loved him as a player at Chelsea and I love him as a broadcaster now. I think everybody loves Pat Nevin.

The other night he was the summariser on a Chelsea game and named a change Graham Potter needed to make and why - bring on Aubameyang, even though he's not looked that interested lately, so Havertz could play a little deeper, which suits his game - just before Potter made it. And the change worked.

That is the sort of analysis listeners crave and so rarely get.

And then there was his hinterland. Here was a player who appeared on art quiz programmes hosted by George Melly.

So when I saw his memoir The Accidental Footballer in the library I grabbed it. And I'm not disappointed:

When Annabel wasn't around, if I wasn't eating at the Chelsea Kitchen you would find me at another cheap café called Vince's at Fulham Broadway with another friend, John Millar, the new young full back at Chelsea. I always tried to help and integrate the young players coming through, especially but not exclusively if they had come down from Scotland. 

In the café we started chatting about 'fitba' and 'Glesga' to a gruff, Rangers-supporting, six-foot-tall Glaswegian called Wullie who worked as a road sweeper. We started to see him regularly in the café and I suppose what follows tells you a lot about why I loved London so much, 

A few months after we'd met him Wullie asked, ''So wit ur ye daein the night, wee man?' 

'Actually I am going down to the South Bank.' I sheepishly said. 'There's a retrospective on about the Garman film director Werner Herzog and he is doing a talk afterwards that I want to hear...' I tailed off expecting a torrent of abuse from the road sweeper for being a culture snob. 

'Funny that,' says Wullie. 'So am I'. 

After months of talking 'fitba', spouting nonsense and judging each other as rough 'Glesga boys' it turned out that among other things he had a deep love of the arts, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Wagner's Ring Cycle and was also a friend of Sir Peter Hall! 

As to the question of whether Pat Nevin and Terry Butcher are cousins, it seems they are not blood relatives but are related by marriage.

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"This country has transformed children in care into commodities in a misery market. Then they discard them when they’re too old – usually at 16 to semi-independent accommodation, or as a 2019 report conducted by the all-party parliamentary group for runaway and missing children and adults put it, into a 'frightening, twilight world of unregulated semi-independent homes'." Daniel Lavelle says it shouldn’t be down to John Lewis’s Christmas commercial to stand up for children in care.

More and more ministers are handed top jobs for their loyalty rather than their competence. Alexandra Hall Hall considers what we can do about this democratic deficit.

Kamran Abassi says the General Medical Council, which is responsible for regulating doctors in the United Kingdom, must reform itself or die.

Opera is not elitist, argues Alexandra Wilson: "Calling opera elitist doesn’t make it more accessible to anybody. It’s a terrible sales pitch: how many people would be tempted to explore an art form they had been constantly told was elitist? Describing classical music in these terms plays straight into the hands of anyone looking for an excuse to cut school music lessons, reduce the amount of opera on TV or, yes, remove subsidies from arts organisations that bring joy to people’s lives and do a lot of social good."

Tim Walker remembers interviewing the British actor Harry Andrews. Until I read this piece I had no idea that Andrews was gay.

Chris Dalla Riva finds that key changes are employed much less frequently in number one hits from after 1990 and identifies the cause.

Boy singer heckled on stage during Covent Garden opera

From the Guardian:

A heckler has been banned for life from the Royal Opera House after shouting “rubbish” at a 12-year-old actor during a production of Handel’s opera Alcina.

The incident occurred while Malakai Bayoh was singing his lines at the opening night of the opera on Tuesday.

Other audience members shushed the heckler, who left soon after.

Martin Kettle, who wrote the paper's review of the first night, equivocated over the heckler's motivation:

Jones’s dramatically poignant choice of a child alto (here a reedy Malakhai Bayoh) to sing the lost boy Oberto caused barracking from one single person that was quickly – and rightly – drowned in cheers from everyone else.

You fear that motivation was simple racism, but if the heckler was protesting against the choice of a child to play the part he was displaying his ignorance.

Because the part of Oberto was written by Handel for a boy - in fact for a particular boy, William Savage:

Savage first came to prominence as a boy treble in 1735, singing in a revival of Handel's Athalia and in Alcina during the composer's Covent Garden season. The role of Oberto in Alcina was specially composed with his voice in mind and was added to the score at a later time in order just to cast him.

Orberto has two solo arias in the opera. There's a plaintive one in which he tells of his search for his missing father, and an angry one sung when he confronts the sorceress who has turned his father into a lion. (Well, it is an opera.)

As the programme for a Paris production of the opera says, the music suggests Savage was able to convey a full range of emotions, not just the innocence that children came to be used to display in opera.

But then Savage was 14 or 15 when he sang these arias at the premiere of Alina, and poor Bayoh is only 12.

I know this about Alcina because Aksel Rykvvin, who I think is the finest boy treble I have heard, included both arias on his first CD. I have included the defiant one here and you can also listen to the plaintive Chi m'insegna il caro padre? He too was 12 when he recorded these.

Martin Kettle has written a column about this incident, but ducks the question of the heckler's motivation and defends the practice of booing performers.

He makes operagoers appear much like the public school boys Rebecca West dissected in The Meaning of Treason:

While everybody knows Englishmen are sent to public schools because that is the only place they can learn good manners, it unfortunately happens that the manners they learn there are recognised as good only by people who have been to the same sort of school, and often appear very bad indeed to everybody else.

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Alex Massie is not impressed by Dominic Raab: "Why should champagne be reserved to those with the right credentials? Why, for that matter, is there something self-evidently ludicrous about a working-class person enjoying opera? Should she know her place and appreciate that somewhere such as Glyndebourne may never be her kind of place?"

In a very real sense, Dominic Minghella was at school with Steve Bray.

David Baddiel on acceptable and unacceptable Jewish Jokes: "There is a somewhat idiot notion abroad, in the endless commentary on comedy online, that jokes either punch up or punch down, and one is evil and the other is acceptable, but actually comedy is much more fluid than that."

The Labour/Plaid Cymru government in Wales is consulting on banning the sale of tea and coffee to under-16s. Peter Black is not impressed.

"What set Blackwell apart from other British music moguls was his passion for the Black music of Jamaica. He made his first living stocking Jamaican jukeboxes and became immersed in the Jamaican deejay scene, seeking out esoteric dance records to keep feet on the floor." Daniel de Visé reviews the memoirs of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.

Rick Glanvill looks at the reign of Ted Drake, who in 1954-5 became the first manager to make Chelsea champions of the top division.

Dominic Raab and the Tories' war on culture

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Dominic Raab's implication at prime minister's questions today that working-class people should not like opera is just part, not so much of the Conservatives' culture war, as their war on culture.

We are currently seeing a cull of arts courses in the post-1992 universities, which are the ones that students from poorer backgrounds are most likely to attend.

And this cull has received theoretical backing from David Goodhart, an Old Etonian whom I just missed seeing as one of the leading Trots on campus at York,* and my own MP Neil O'Brien, who went from a state education in Huddersfield to Oxford, but does not seem overkeen that others should follow his route.

Add to this the decline of subjects like music and drama in schools and there is a danger that a knowledge of the arts will once again become the preserve of the upper classes.

There was a good discussion of these issues in a Radio Four debate broadcast from a Leicester school in 2018. I am pleased to find you can still listen to it on the BBC website.

While we are talking about the arts, a word about Nadhim Zahawi and Philip Larkin.

After two years of Gavin Williamson, it's wonderful to have an education secretary who has his favourite poets and obviously cares about them deeply.

However, his reaction to Larkin and Wilfred Owen's omission from a GCSE poetry anthology - that it is "cultural vandalism" - turned it into one more salvo in the Tories' culture war.

Larkin and Owen have not been cancelled, it's just that there are many fine 20th-century poets and GCSE students cannot study them all every year.

I have a fondness for W.H.Auden and Edwin Muir. Is it cultural vandalism if they're not in this anthology?

Of course not.

* A few years before Goodhart, one of York's leading Trots was Peter Hitchens. These public school lefties are so predictable.

Insight into the new Royal Opera House production of Peter Grimes

Members of the cast and creative team discuss Deborah Warner’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes ahead of its opening at Covent Garden on 17 March. Tickets from the Royal Opera House site.

It's a wonderful opera, but weren't the Borough gossips right about Grimes?

A difficult year: Lord Bonkers in 2020

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

February

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

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

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

April

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

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

June

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

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

You may feel that rather gives the game away.

July

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

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

August

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

September

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

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

October

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

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

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

November

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

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

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

December

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

Here he is on the 1990 Eastbourne by-election:

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

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

Today I went to Bonkers Hall - or to Nevill Holt at least

Celebrating 20 years of Lord Bonkers' Diary I wrote:

Growing up in Market Harborough, it was hard to ignore Lord Bonkers. If you climbed any of the hills that ringed the town then the slender spire of St Asquith’s, the gaunt pinnacles of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans and, most impressive of all, the towers, domes and follies of Bonkers Hall and its grounds, would dominate the view to the North. 

Lord Bonkers himself was rarely seen in town, though his longevity – he had ceased to be Liberal MP for Rutland South-West as long ago as 1910, people said wonderingly – and his generosity to local charities were often spoken of. 

That said, his incursion into the Market Harborough North Ward by-election of 1982 – and the subsequent court case – kept us in gossip for months. 

As a teenager, armed with a water bottle and Ordnance Survey map, I cycled out to find Bonkers Hall many times, only to return defeated on every occasion. Those towers and domes seemed clear enough from a distance, but when you neared them strange things began to happen. 

Rounding the final bend that would surely bring you face to face with the Hall, you found that it was not there after all but somewhere over your shoulder instead. Turn your bike round to complete the pursuit and the same thing would happen. The harder you pedalled towards the place, the more quickly it seemed to retreat.

Today I went to Bonkers Hall again - or at least to Nevill Holt, which many scholars believe to be the model for it.

Nevill Holt stands on a hill a mile or more from the village of Medbourne. Before making the ascent I had a fortifying pint at the village's pub, the Nevill Arms, which those same scholars suggest is the model for the Bonkers' Arms.

As you can see from these photographs, Nevill Holt is more than a house - it is practically a village in its own right. And it commands wonderful views over the surrounding countryside, including what Lord Bonkers always calls "the broad valley of the Welland".

It was for many years the home of the Cunard family until they vacated it in 1912. It was standing empty in 1914 when suffragettes tried to burn it down.

In 1919 a prep school for boys was opened here. It closed suddenly (as prep schools for boys will) after a police raid in 1998.

A lighthearted post on this blog has steadily acquired comments about life at the school ever since it went up in 2010. Some of them have been picked up by the Nevill Holt Preparatory School site, which says it is investigating abuse at the school.

Nevill Holt has since become a private home again. It is owned by David Ross, who made his fortune from the Carphone Warehouse.

He has recently opened an opera house in the stable block, making Nevill Holt the Glyndebourne of the East Midlands.

There are also sculptures scattered about the grounds and even a copy of the Ed Stone.

Most amazing of all today, I was passed by what looked very like a service bus as I began the descent to Medbourne.

It must surely be some kind of dial-a-ride service, but one day I mean to catch the bus to Bonkers Hall.

New opera house planned for Bonkers Hall

Photo of the stable block at Nevill Holt by Mat Fascione

A few days ago the Leicester Mercury reported:

A permanent opera house could be built in the heart of a historic country mansion. 

Multi millionaire entrepreneur David Ross has filed plans to build a 400-seater auditorium in the centre of a 17th century stable yard. 

It will replace a temporary structure at the medieval Nevill Holt Hall near Market Harborough which is beyond effective repair. 

Agents and architects for the project say a permanent home is needed if the opera is to be retained. 

For more than a decade more than 20,000 people have attended productions during the summer opera festival. 

Productions have included Carmen and this year there were sell out audiences for Verdi's Rigoletto and Donizetti's The Elixir of Love. 

Recently school children have been invited to sample classical music and take part in productions.

Regular readers will recall that most literary scholars now believe that Nevill Holt was the model for Bonkers Hall.

Lord Bonkers does mention the Royal Opera House, Oakham, from time to time, but I can see him having an opera house.

He might use it to perform his own operas which, on a Wagnerian scale, would tell the story of British Liberalism.

Speaking of Nevill Holt and Wagner...