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“I couldn’t shake the fear that future generations might never experience the world as I had, that we might go down in history as the generation that knew exactly what was coming, but chose to look away. That’s what brought me into parliament.” Roz Savage explains why she supports statutory targets on climate and nature.

Alfie Steer considers the prospects for a new party to the left of Labour: “Peter Mandelson is once reported to have said that disillusioned left-wing Labour voters simply had ‘nowhere else to go’. But Sultana and Corbyn’s left party may be the biggest challenge to that theory that the Labour Party has ever seen. Despite all the problems that face the new party, it would be the absolute height of complacency for the Labour Party leadership to underestimate it.”

John Hyde on the publication of the first volume of the report of the Post Office Horizon Inquiry: “Sir Wyn Williams said it was ‘indefensible’ that the government refuses to pay for claimants in the Horizon Shortfall Scheme to speak to a lawyer before deciding whether to accept a fixed offer of compensation.”

Generative AI is like a friend who's a psychopathic liar, except it's not actually like a friend, says Steve Lane.

“I’m fascinated by this story, partly because I’m fascinated by all alleged liars and the question of why they lie; and partly because it rings bells, reminding me of a strikingly similar story from a century ago, in which another female writer also gained fame through a fake ‘nature cure’ narrative.” Rachel Hewitt offers a different take on the Salt Path scandal.

Stuart Heritage complains that television episodes have become too long, stretching the limits of the medium and reducing our enjoyment in the process.

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"Kemi maintained her attack on the machine. Everything was their fault. The previous Conservative government was entirely blameless. Especially her. In her own mind she was the saviour of the post office operatives. Though judging by the laughs from the back of the room, they don’t see it in quite the same way." John Crace says Kemi Badenoch was seen at her brittle, narcissistic worst while giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

Alwyn Turner tells a story that has dropped out of remembrance of the first world war: "On 19 July 1919 - declared by the government to be Peace Day - parades were staged all over the country to mark the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and at many of those parades there were demonstrations and protests. A banner in Glasgow sarcastically announced: '400,000 unemployed ex-servicemen. A grateful country will never forget you'."

Patrick Howse asks if Labour will restore the BBC to the national broadcaster we need it to be or believe it can benefit from a subservient corporation afraid to hold power to account.

"Many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always - like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time." Jonathan Coe chooses five favourite recent political novels.

Hannah Long believes that Night of the Hunter is a Christmas film. Hear her: "This promise - that evil is powerful, but ultimately ridiculous and defeatable - carries us into the final hope of the last scene, set at Christmastime. It says, in the least sentimental way possible, that it’s possible to move beyond abuse."

"‘The Whiting’ is an absent-minded vicar so passionate about entomology that he forgets everything in pursuit of an elusive Wood White or a Purple Emperor. Then there’s old Smokoe Joe, a gruff charcoal-burner with a gargantuan nose who lives in the Chase; and the boys’ nemesis, the ponderous local bobby, Sergeant Bunting." Helena Drysdale celebrates Brendon Chase by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford).

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"As just one of a handful of MPs known to have grown up in care, I am hugely conscious of just how fortunate I have been on my journey. Fortunate because I had fantastic foster parents who then adopted me, and who always encouraged me in education and supported my aspirations. And fortunate because my experience has been so different from that of so many other care-experienced children and young people." Darren Paffey says that care-experienced children and young people are too often written off before they even take their first steps into adulthood.

Edward Henry KC talks to Legal Business: "I've been very fortunate to have two of the most remarkable cases that any barrister could hope for: the Andrew Malkinson appeal and representing the subpostmasters who were destroyed by the Post Office in the Post Office Horizon inquiry. Those clients, Andrew and the subpostmasters, are remarkably wonderful people. It’s a huge privilege and honour to represent them. I don’t think I can put into words how important their interests are to me, particularly given the monstrous injustices they suffered."

Alan Lester sets out the top five manoeuvres used to avoid discussion of reparations for slavery.

"I recently came across two rather depressing reflections on the present and future of the Internet. One contemplated the apparent death of the hyperlink, the original glue that held the World Wide Web together. The second predicted that within just two or three years, 80 per ent or more of all the text on the Internet would be machine generated." Kate Watson asks if we can make an internet fit for people again.

Laura D'Olimpio argues that encountering philosophy at school gives young people the tools to discuss difficult topics like the Israel-Gaza war.

"Some described Spring-heeled Jack as a ghost, some as a bear, an armoured man, a devil; others suspected he might be a dissolute aristocrat. As well as his flaming breath and burning red eyes, many claimed he had the astounding ability to spring or leap great distances, bounding over walls and hedges and even onto house roofs." David Castleton wonders who or what a figure that terrorised Victorian London was.

In praise of Jason Beer KC, the counsel to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

The clinical psychologist Dr Paul Duckett examines the techniques used by Jason Beer KC, counsel to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

Notably, he sees Beer's mastery of comedy as one of the five keys to his masterly performance.

For those who have been following the hearing, it's good to re-encounter favourite characters like Paula Vennells, Rodric Williams and - above all - Jarnail Singh.

I agree with all Duckett says, and would also like to put in a word for Sir Wyn Williams, the chair of the inquiry,

When he makes one of his Columbo-like interventions - "Before we move on, can I get one thing clear in my head..." or "I'm probably being very slow, but..." - you just know he's about to ask a killer question.

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"There is virtually no social, cultural or legal protection for Muslims. Organisations that ought to protect them - think of the refusal of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to launch an enquiry into Tory Islamophobia - wash their hands. No wonder we’ve seen this horrific street violence. It’s surprising it’s not happened before." Peter Oborne says the UK's media and politicians are almost wholly to blame for this week's riots.

Sara Wilford asks why are so many of the rioters are in their forties and fifties.

Hugo Daniel hears the voices of the forgotten child victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "Within a space of two years we lost all the money Mum and Dad had, we lost our home, our friends and then we lost Mum. The sheer stress and panic she faced, there was no way she could fight both cancer and the Post Office, and ultimately she lost both battles."

"Few people ever thought that the Leader of North East Lincolnshire Council might be a Liberal Democrat, that he would be of Caribbean descent, and that his tenure as Leader would see great achievements for the Borough." Ed Fordham and Ian Barfield remember Andrew De Freitas.

"Like technology companies, stakeholders in science must realize that making error detection and correction part of the scientific landscape is a sound investment." Malte Elson makes the case for paying researchers to spot errors in published science papers.

John Check reviews a biography of Mama Cass Elliot by the singer's daughter: "After her last show, she attended a birthday party for Mick Jagger, then returned to the flat she had rented. She went to bed and never woke up, dying of a heart attack. An urban legend that bizarrely became almost universally accepted - that she choked to death on a ham sandwich - was concocted ... by her ... manager, who feared for the reputation of his client. The story seemed more innocent than association with the dangers of 'the rock-and-roll lifestyle."

Well, that about wraps it up for Sherlock Holmes

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I have my doubts about Sherlock Holmes’s method of reasoning. Take what is probably his most famous formula:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

It sounds impressive, but it really isn’t.

Every event, I would suggest, has an infinite number of possible explanations. And if you don’t buy that, you still have to agree that every event has an enormous number of possible explanations. Which means that eliminating impossible explanations is not a practical way of investigating a crime.

Perhaps Holmes meant it more pragmatically – something like, if you have several suspects then once all but one has been eliminated then the person left must be guilty. But that won’t do either. Your original suspects may all have been innocent.

I can see Holmes’s approach working in a closed system like formal logic, mathematics or chess, but not in solving messy, real-world problems.

I saw another of Holmes’s lines the other day, and I think it’s equally suspect:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Again, there is an infinite amount of data. In order to gather it for an investigation, you must already have theories about what is likely to be useful. As Karl Popper says somewhere, if you tell someone to “observe”, they will ask “Observe what?” Observation, like data-gathering, is necessarily laden with theory.

And while twisting facts to suit theories is obviously wrong, twisting theories in the face of facts is dangerous too. What can happen is that once you have a suspect, you think of ingenious tweaks to your theory to account for new information that appears to exonerate them. There comes a point where, to be rational, you have to abandon your theory rather than twist it.

I was encouraged to write this post when I heard Ron Warmington interviewed the other day. He was one of the two authors of the Second Sight report that revealed that the Post Office was persecuting and prosecuting innocent sub postmasters.

Before working for Second Sight, he had been a fraud investigator with multinational companies. And he said that his approach if someone was suspected was to assume they were guilty and then look for ways of proving they were innocent.

If this approach had been adopted by Post Office investigators, they would have found that none of the supposed thieves had thousands in the bank or had just bought a flash new car. They would have found that the missing money had never existed.

So maybe Sherlock Holmes was not as clever as he thought?

Of course, he may have been misquoted by Dr Watson or Conan Doyle. I'd like to give my thanks to Oolon Colluphid and Karl Popper for the inspiration.

Jo Swinson's appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

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Well, Jo Swinson certainly proved a more forceful witness than Ed Davey, who seemed to fall back on a masochism strategy from the start.

The first sentence of Nick Wallis's blog post on her appearance yesterday puts it well:

During her evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry former minister Jo Swinson today highlighted the mendacity of the Post Office and what she saw as the conniving “duplicitous” behaviour of her chief civil service advisor.

Or you can read a more colourful version on Twitter: 

'She was an ordained minister. I believed her [pause] I believed her.'

Jo Swinson puts Paula Vennels under the bus, gets in the bus, drives over her, reverses, then drives over her again to make sure. 🤔

— Charles Wheeler (@tweetcmw) July 19, 2024

You can see Jo's evidence in two videos - one and two - on YouTube, but for some reason they are age-restricted so you'll have to watch them there.

In that second video she is followed after 20 minutes or so by the former Post Office chief executive Dame Moya Greene, whose comments got press coverage too.

Ed Davey gives his evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Here are the videos of the Lib Dem leader's appearance before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry today.

He began to give evidence shortly before the lunch break - that's the video above, which should start where Ed's evidence begins - and returned for a much longer session after it. That's in the video below.

Ed suffered sounded increasingly contrite and suffered some awkward moments. I'll add more comment when Nick Wallis has published his blog post on his evidence.

Later. Wallis has now posted his piece on Ed Davey's evidence and it's not flattering. You can read it on his Post Office Scandal blog.

A taste:

Ultimately ministers continued to swallow the guff coming from their officials and the Post Office in preference to what they were being told by the JFSA [Justice for Postmasters Alliance], MPs, Second Sight, a few journalists and, eventually, a whistleblower. 

As the Inquiry has seen, government officials were all too ready to actively collude in the Post Office’s lies because it was the easier thing to do.

Ed Davey, Jo Swinson and Vince Cable to appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, will appear before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry on Thursday.

Two former leaders of the party are also about to give evidence to the inquiry. Jo Swinson will give evidence on Friday and Vince Cable on Thursday of next week (25 July).

My impression as a follower of these hearing's is that Jo's name has cropped up in proceedings more often than the other two, but I suspect those who think responsibility for the scandal will be pinned on past government ministers are in for a disappointment.

Writing in the Guardian, Jane Croft suggests:

The toughest questioning is likely to be reserved for politicians who held office under Conservative governments from 2015, when the scandal was regularly hitting the headlines. ... 

Greg Clark, business secretary between 2016 and 2019, will testify in late July, as will ... former ministers Margot James and Kelly Tolhurst.

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Richard Kemp says the Liberal Democrats must be a party of the major cities as well of the shires and suburbs: "We will only be a truly national party when we represent people in all areas and from all walks of life. We will now have a greater resource than at any time in my political career to begin to achieve this."

Jason Beer KC discusses being crowned Barrister of the Year, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and what it has done for public understanding of the role of barristers.

"If you don’t already have generational wealth, your kid will feel it sooner or later. The average fee for an independent school is £16,650. If the schools pass on the VAT increase, that will mean an extra £2,500 a year. If that is too much for your family, then you are better off not sending your kid to a substandard private school." Stella Tsantekidou has some advice for parents.

"There is ... only one sustainable future for the series and the now completed volumes for England, Scotland and Wales, and that future is digital. A small group of supporters are actively pursuing this prospect. Should the project succeed, subscribers will benefit from corrections and updates and a GPS locator." Gillian Darley looks to the future of Niklaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series.

"From writer-director Cy Enfield’s desire to capture native customs on film to the acknowledgement of Cetewayo’s tactical expertise, the picture depicts the Zulus in a manner far removed from the way Africans had been previously depicted on film." Richard Luck defends the politics of Enfield's 1964 film Zulu.

John Lewis-Stempel makes a plea on behalf of eels and for a change in human thinking about nature: "Like everything about the eel, the reasons for its calamitous decline - 95% globally since the 1970s - are mysterious, although shifts in the oceanic currents which bring the elvers to Europe and the pollution of waterways are causal contenders. And it is the eel’s bad luck to be enigmatic rather than charismatic."

Nigel Farage's defamation action against the Mail is going nowhere

Says who? Says a practising barrister, that's who.

Following the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has introduced me to the world of legal vloggers. And one of my favourites is Alan Robertshaw, whose YouTube account is Art of Law.

He provides legal comment on stories in the news, and you can watch his views on Nigel Farage's spat with the Daily Mail at the top of this post.

Robertshaw, who also teaches young barristers, provides more general comment on the law from time to time.

So you can enjoy his thoughts on the art of advocacy and on how to be the perfect witness.

The latter could be useful to anyone. I once gave a witness statement for the defence in a civil action, but the plaintiff died before the case was heard, so I never got my day in court.

Post Office Scandal: A blog that keeps you up to date with the inquiry and other developments

Yesterday saw two eminent lawyers appearing in front of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry: Anthony de Garr Robinson KC and Lord Grabiner KC.

This gives me a chance to recommend the entertaining blog on the inquiry written by Nick Wallis, whose reporting did much to bring the scandal to light.

Here are his two posts on the day. First de Garr Robinson:

Poor old Tony Robinson, just trying to make an honest crust defending his client, whilst being misled by his instructing solicitors (Womble Bond Dickinson), his client’s supplier (Fujitsu) or possibly even his client – the Post Office!

As leading counsel for the Post Office in the Horizon Issues trial during Bates v Post Office, de Garr Robinson regularly seemed to be on the receiving end of duff information, which he took at face value and dutifully represented to to the High Court as fact. This, as he described in his witness statement, was sub-optimal. Recalling the first such occasion, he wrote:

"I had unintentionally misled the court. As will be clear from the rest this statement, this was not the first occasion on which such a thing happened, and nor was it the last. It is a horrifying experience."

And here's Grabiner:

Up until this point in his evidence, Lord Grabiner had been acting with courtesy and politeness. Something seemed to change. Grabiner replied:

"Well what Lord Neuberger thought, I think you’d better ask him about. I can’t really climb into his mind beyond what he has said in communications that we have between ourselves that I’ve made full disclosure of."

As Grabiner and the Inquiry well knows, Lord Neuberger is not being called to give evidence, possibly to spare such a senior person from being embarrassed by his actions.

Lord Neuberger, a former president of the Supreme Court and sometime Master of the Rolls, had given rather gung-ho advice to the Post Office, urging it to challenge the impartiality of the judge in the class action by sub-postmasters that it was defending. The challenge failed.

I'm reminded of Gladstone's observation that former prime ministers are "like untethered rafts drifting around harbours - a menace to shipping".

Nick Wallis writes on his blog:

If you want to stay on top of what is happening with the scandal and are able to make a small (or large) donation, you will be added to the 'secret; email – an irregular and sometimes irreverent newsletter which will give you the inside track on what is happening around this story.

There are now many hundreds of subscribers to the secret email, which started in 2018, just before the first trial in the Bates v Post Office High Court litigation.

More details here.

The British Establishment is a House of Straw

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The witness before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry these past two days has been has been Alice Perkins, who was chair of the Post Office board between 2011 and 2015.

She also became a director of the BBC in 2014, which made her position ticklish when Panorama began investigating the Horizon scandal.

As John Sweeney, journalist and now Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton Coldfield, wrote in Byline Times in January, this mean that in May, June and July 2015, Perkins had:

lived with the mother of all conflicts of interest. I have trawled through the relevant BBC minutes for that period and I can find no declaration of it.

But I'm not alleging any wrongdoing here. Having listened to Perkins before the inquiry, I am sure that she will have simply forgotten that she was a director of the BBC.

Yes, she followed the pattern for appearing before the inquiry that was established by Post Office leaders. In a really tight corner, blame you underlings, and otherwise claim you don't remember.

If the Post Office is at all typical of the standard of British management, then this inquiry has laid bare a major reason for our poor economic performance.

Alice Perkins is married to Jack Straw, and is the mother of Will Straw CBE, mastermind of the useless Office Remain campaign in the EU referendum.

Don't like the decision? Try to change the referee

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I don't know if this is a new trend or a coincidence, but there are three stories in the news that involve challenges to the impartiality of a court or tribunal.

In the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, the Post Office tried to get Judge Fraser removed from hearing the case Bates v Post Office. They questioned his impartiality because the case was going badly for them.

On Wednesday an employment tribunal has ruled that Norfolk and Waveney Clinical Commissioning Group constructively dismissed an assistant director, Clive Rennie. During the hearing, says BBC News, NHS documents were not disclosed and an attempt was even made to remove the judge.

And yesterday lawyers acting for the chief constable of Northamptonshire in a disciplinary hearing asked the members of three-person independent panel to recuse themselves because they are "biased". The Northamptonshire Telegraph has the story - the panel has yet to return its verdict on this or the allegations against the chief constable.

Maybe such moves have always been going on behind the scenes, but they do feel like part of the Trumpian degradation of public life.

Top Post Office lawyer refuses to appear before Horizon IT Inquiry

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One of the key legal figures in the later years of the Post Office scandal is refusing to appear at the public inquiry into it, reports Law Gazette.

Jane MacLeod, who was the organisation's chief in-house lawyer between 2015 and 2019, was due to appear as a witness next month to explain her role in the civil litigation that fully exposed the scandal.

But today the counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer KC, told another witness before the inquiry: "We are not going to hear from her. She lives abroad and won’t co-operate."

The Law Gazette report tells us:

MacLeod was head of the Post Office legal team during the Bates v Post Office litigation and is believed to have advised chairman Tim Parker not to share the review authored by Treasury lawyer Jonathan Swift KC. This review had found ‘real issues’ for the Post Office.

MacLeod told the BBC earlier this year that she could not comment on papers showing the Post Office knew its defence in the Bates litigation was untrue. She said at the time that she supported the ongoing public inquiry and was assisting it. She added that while the inquiry was ongoing ‘I do not think it is appropriate to comment at this time’.

If you had asked MacLeod to justify her large salary while at the Post Office, she would have talked about the responsibility her job involved. But when she is actually asked to bear some responsibility, we don't see her cowardly arse for dust.

And this has been true of many senior Post Office executives who have appeared before the inquiry. "I don't recall" and "I don't remember" are the phrases that have been most often heard. One lawyer claimed not to know the standard of proof required in criminal cases,

Really it has been the modern business corporation, with its absurd difference in pay and status between those at the top and the rest of its employees and its secrecy, that has been in the dock at the inquiry. Why does it allow such awful people to prosper?

This is something to remember when Paul Vennells appears before the inquiry from Wednesday to Friday of next week. Sure, I'll be laying stocks of popcorn and rotten vegetables, but the issues at stake there go deeper than a few individuals, however unpleasant they are.

Politicians aren't gaslighting the public: we're being lied to

We should all be more like Jason Beer KC, the lead counsel to the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

Because you don't hear politicians accused of lying any more. Instead, they're accused of gaslighting us.

The concept comes from Gas Light, a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton set in the London of the 1880s. In it, a man tries to convince his wife that she is going mad.

The story is so well known because, under the title Gaslight, it was twice filmed. First in England in 1940 and then in Hollywood in 1944. It was the latter production that gave the 17-year-old Angela Lansbury her big break in movies.

I suppose the concept of 'gaslighting' appeals to modern sensibilities because it paints the voters as victims. We faint alternately on the sofa like ineffectual Victorian heroines.

And for a certain sort of left-winger, the masses do now exist to be counselled, policed and therapised.

I prefer a radical politics that wants the workers to take control of their own lives - even to run the industries in which they labour.

So let's give up 'gaslighting' and be more like Jason Beer KC. If we hear a lie we should say so.

Karl Popper, the Post Office Horizon IT scandal and solutioneering

Private Eye reminds us of the genesis of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal:

Conceived in 1996 as one of the first private finance initiative contracts, between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency on the one hand and computer company ICL on the other, the Horizon IT system had an unpromising start. It had been set up to create a swipe card system for payment of pensions and benefits from Post Office branch counters. 

When, in May 1999, the plug was finally pulled on what the Commons public accounts committee called 'one of the biggest IT failures in the public sector', taxpayers had lost around £700m. Something had to be salvaged, however. 

So, against the better judgement of its IT specialists, the Post Office decided to use the system to transform its paper-based branch accounting into an electronic system covering the full range of Post Office services. The new Horizon project became the largest non-military IT contract in Europe.

And, though I can't find the reference today, I have read that considerable pressure was put on the Post Office. Its executives were told they could whistle for more government investment if they didn't buy Horizon.

All of which reminds me of Roger James, who wrote a book seeking to apply the insights of Karl Popper's philosophy to public affairs. That 1980 book, Return to Reason, can be found online.

One of the useful concepts James introduces is 'solutioneering', which he characterises as:

Jumping to a solution before clearly formulating what the problem is (or indeed if there is one at all) or how success or failure are to be judged. Achievement of the solution then becomes the goal; and, when opposition develops, the problem becomes how to get the solution accepted, while the question of how best to solve the original problem, if there was one, never gets discussed at all. I call this mistake solutioneering.

Horizon wasn't a solution to one, clearly defined problem, but the Post Office was nevertheless determined to defend its reputation at all costs. Anyone who raised doubts about whether it could do all that was being asked of it was treated as a threat to the organisation.

Remember Calder Womble, Remember Calder Womble

I have learnt from my addiction to the livestream of the proceedings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry that there is a transatlantic law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson.

Indeed, two of its partners are due to give evidence to the inquiry in June - I believe the firm was retained by the Post Office for a time. (No doubt someone will be on hand to whisper "Remember you're a Womble" in their ear before they take the stand.)

Naturally, I was curious about a lawyer called Womble, and the Womble Bond Dickinson site does give some of the family history in a 2016 obituary for William F. Womble, Sr. - or Bill Womble, Sr. if you knew him well.

Bill's father, and the first of the lawyer Wombles, was B.S. Womble. That's Bunyan Snipes Womble.

And Bunyan Womble had a brother, also a lawyer, called Calder.

I shall not forget Calder Womble.

Incidentally, if you follow the Womble family back through American genealogy sites, and it's surprisingly easy to do so, it seems their name was originally Wombwell.

Hooked on the livestream from the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry

Imagine a cross between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the interview episode of The Apprentice. That's what you get from the hearings of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry.

The inquiry's website carries a livestream during the day and also has a complete archive of recordings of all the hearings to date. It's well worth exploring. I won't pick out any names, but I doubt you'll come away impressed with the quality of Post Office personnel at any grade.

To whet your appetite, I've chosen part of this afternoon's evidence from Angela van den Bogerd, former People Services Director at Post Office Ltd and Programme Director for the Branch Support Programme.

Asking the questions is the impressive Jason Beer KC, counsel to the inquiry,

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Right up to the day they cut his head off

Heavens! I've seldom known the old boy so forthright. Freddie and Fiona did eventually relent and allow Ed Davey to apologise, but I doubt that has been enough to quell the passion in the village - or in Lord Bonkers' breast.

Thursday

Did you see Mr Bates vs The Post Office? It shocked me, I will confess. If they can get away with treating Toby Jones like that, is any of us safe? 

In London on business this afternoon, I make time to beard Davey in his Westminster Office. “Don’t you think you should say you’re sorry?” I ask him. “It’s not as if anyone thinks it’s all your fault.” “It’s Freddie and Fiona,” he explains. “They won’t let me.” “Then you’d better find yourself some better advisers,” I return. “I have to tell you that it went down very badly in the village when Mr Patel was dragged off to gaol.” 

On the journey back to Rutland, I reflect on our strange way of always blaming a leader’s advisers rather than the leader himself. Parliament was saying Charles I was poorly advised right up to the day they cut his head off.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• The board of Thames Water, Mauricio Pochettino and Nigella Lawson
• They could most fairly be described as "repentant headhunters"
• Mr Gladstone with his dander up