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 Vince Cable makes the case for building more council houses: "The most compelling argument for councils becoming developers is that the private developer model, however valid for most housebuilding most of the time, depends on a set of circumstances – the ability to earn a profit margin above rising land and property prices – which may not exist. Public sector developers can build through economic cycles and where market conditions are unattractive for private developers."

"Changes in public spaces (including increased provision of green parks, lakes and water fountains) enable easy public access to cooling. Everyday heat adaptation is not only about technological fixes, but about building or redesigning everyday infrastructures that enable a fair and equitable living environment for everybody, whatever the weather." Subina Shrestha and Claire Hoolohan on what Britain must do to prepare for future heatwaves.

Mark Braund looks at Andy Burnham's past support of a land value tax.

"Three Lions has started to to more harm than good. I think that 'thirty years of hurt' line has helped seed a sense of entitlement, a baked-in belief that anything other than outright victory legitimises a sense of hurt. It raises the stakes and ratchets up the pressure – a pressure that ultimately bears down on the very players you're counting on to try and deliver a result." Pete Paphides says it's time to say thank you and goodbye to the song Three Lions.

"The final prisoners left Crumlin Road Gaol in 1996 and, in 2012, it reopened as a visitor attraction and conference centre, sharing the grounds with McConnell’s whisky distillery. Although the prison experience is now dominated by atmospheric lighting, holographic presentations and short information videos, it is possible to see the history behind the modern technology." Angela Buckley experiences the Crumlin Road Gaol Experience.

Jeremy Rees celebrates the magnificent Queenie Watts.

Paddington Bear: Slapstick, boosting Jeremy Clarkson's career and becoming our grim reaper

Paddington Bear is a couple of years older than me, so I had one of the books about him when I was a little boy. 

I quite liked the Paddington stories and certainly liked his friendship with Mr Gruber, who treated what was essentially a furry child as though he were an equal. Children really appreciate characters like that.

But you didn't have to grow that old before you started to find all the slapstick a bit babyish. And then there was the weak characterisation. The son of the Brown household was called Jonathan, and he added little to the action beyond saying "Crikey!" now and then. I was bound to notice that.

But the television and film adaptations have made the meh bear a huge cultural figure. Not only has he become the 21st century's grim reaper, conducting the dead to the underworld- more of that in a moment - he was also partly responsible for Jeremy Clarkson's television career.

Here's part of a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

Clarkson and the BBC go back a long way. All the way back to 1973, when as a 13-year-old, be played Atkinson in BBC Radio 4 serialisations of the Jennings books.

Then he went to public school, his fees paid from his mother's business making Paddington Bear toys. And the BBC was Paddington-friendly even before the animations with Michael Hordern's voice, because Michael Bond was a cameraman with them. So you got exclusive Paddington stories in your Blue Peter annual.

And, then, of course, the BBC's Top Gear made Clarkson a millionaire. A little gratitude wouldn't come amiss.

Personally, I'd have taken Paddington's marmalade sandwiches off him for that.

And his new role as our angel of death? Here's the abstract for Jennifer Riley and Matthew Hilborn's paper (Br)Exit pursued by a bear: Paddington's polysemic political power as the `new Grim Reaper':

Though hailing from distant “darkest Peru”, Paddington Bear has become a bastion of British identity. His critically-acclaimed films (2014, 2017, 2024), starring icons of British cinema, trade on nostalgic national tropes. This symbolic imbrication peaked in 2022, starring alongside Queen Elizabeth II in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – and later becoming a symbol of collective mourning, materially and digitally, after her death. Paddington – endangered and repeatedly imperilled onscreen – thus became the Establishment’s new mor(t)al totem, what Douglas Davies would call a ‘paradigmatic’ figure ‘good to think’ in life, and in death. 

His incongruously cuddly ‘Grim Reaper’ became a globally recognisable meme. Yet, since symbols are malleable, and film-based memes subversive and satirical, Paddington has proved a provocative meme(nto mori). Analysing social media posts (X, Instagram) and the films, this article explores Paddington Bear the Grim Reaper as politically polysemic. 

If, following Robert Hertz, society grieves those ‘in whom it incarnates itself, and with whom it identifies itself’, Paddington’s mortal multivocality forces a reckoning. Whose lives – and deaths – are grievable? And which version of Britishness should Paddington embody: the polite, Establishment-aligned “Good Immigrant”, or the racialised, once-incarcerated refugee?

 I thought such wordp(l)ay had gone out of fashion in academia in the early Nineties: I do hope it's not making a comeback. Anyway, if you really want to, you can read the whole article online.

And if you didn't believe me about Jeremy Clarkson being in Jennings, here's a cutting to put your doubts to rest. 

When Boris Johnson's aides feared he was going to kill the Queen

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Pippa Crerar is the political editor of the Guardian, but in June 2021 she was at the Mirror. And there she wrote a story saying that Boris Johnson had tried to have his weekly audience with the late Queen in the usual face-to-face way at the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, even though he was himself going down with the virus.

Only when he was persuaded that he could be responsible for the death of the Queen did he abandon the idea.

No 10 told her the story was "completely untrue," but she stood by it and the Mirror published it.

Today Crerar tweeted extracts from Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell's Johnson at 10: The Inside Story that show her story was true:

The previous day he had been due to meet the Queen for their weekly audience, with Palace and No 10 official going back and forth about whether the meeting could take place in person. 

Johnson was eager not to be restricted by the new laws or his apparent symptoms, to the dismay of Palace officials deeply concerned at the risk of exposing the elderly Queen to the virus.

After some convincing, both from the Palace and Cummings, the prime minister agreed to hold the conversation by phone. The content of a prime minster's audience with the sovereign is sacred, with no advisers in attendance and no official record of the discussion. 

The sanctity of this one would be easier to keep than most: afterwards the Queen turned to an aide and commented that she couldn't hear a word of what Johnson said, he was coughing so much.

We know Johnson was willing to sacrifice the truth to burnish his self-image as a man of courage: he claimed to have shaken hands with Covid patients at Kettering General Hospital, even though it had no such patients when he visited it.

But it seems that, for the sake of that image, he was even prepared to put the life of his sovereign at risk.

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Sarah O'Connor, in a Twitter thread, fact-checks five key assertions from Britannia Unchained (which was co-authored by our new PM and chancellor) and finds them all untrue.

Putin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between left and right, argues Quillette, but offer an example of the two poles making common cause against the centre.

Jeff Sparrow argues that the stronger resistance to fossil fuels grows, the more laws spring up to contain activists: "In Australia, where fossil fuel lobbyists exert tremendous influence over the major political parties, the trend has probably gone further than anywhere else."

"Lord Salisbury, the prime minister at the end of her reign, did everything he could to escape from 'the gruesomeness' of public ceremonies. The result was that the few ceremonial occasions under Victoria often involved embarrassment: marching columns that concertinaed, coffins carried the wrong way, words that were misread and ceremonies that were botched." Adrian Wooldridge examines how the British crown learnt to do pageantry in the 20th century.

"So profound was the PM's passion of the moving picture, her first words on being introduced to Lord Attenborough were 'Why didn't you come years ago?' 'Because I wasn't asked, darling,' Dickie replied." Richard Luck on Margaret Thatcher's ambitions to revive the British film industry.

Simon Matthews reviews a new biography of Aleister Crowley: "Along the way we meet W.B. Yeats, who scorned Crowley as a writer, Clifford Bax, Dennis Wheatley, Gerald Yorke (personal representative of the Dalai Lama), Tom Driberg, Anthony Powell, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Clifford Bax."

The Queen at Lubenham Church in 1956

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Here is the Queen, with the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne, in the churchyard of All Saints Church, Lubenham, a village a couple of miles west of Market Harborough, in 1956. 

With them is Lt-Col. Philips from Thorpe Lubenham Hall, where the royal party had been staying. (The Getty Images caption has these details muddled).

In the background, some people have climbed the embankment of the Market Harborough to Rugby railway line for a better view. You can see a signal by the line; this will have been controlled from Lubenham signal box.

You can read more about Thorpe Lubenham Hall and its royal connections in an article from the Market Harborough Historical Society.

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"These ‘final’ train journeys are part of a long tradition for major public figures such as King George V and Winston Churchill, and everything possible should have been done to maintain this rather special way of enabling people to make their farewells without travelling to London." Christian Wolmar says the Queen’s final journey should have been by train.

David Boyle considers the causes of inflation: "So much of our economy in the UK now panders to the ultra-rich that it has worn grooves where the money flows towards them. It gathers around them like great fatbergs and the inflation gathers there too. Then, hey presto! It spreads around."

Anne Perkins reviews a new biography of Harold Wilson.

"Socially, North-East Scots is of the soil. Its distinctiveness derives from the traditional work and lives of its inhabitants, in particular, farming and fishing. This means that much which made it so distinctive has faded as the world has changed." Robert McColl Millar on Doric - once the language of the Scottish court, it is now a dialect of English.

Conrad Brunstrom watches the John Lennon film How I Won the War: "The film is certainly a satire on war movies, and on how a certain kind of British war movie is constructed for propaganda purposes. But it’s clearly more ambitious than a mere genre satire effort."

South West London once had a network of trolleybuses. Roger French joins a group retracing its routes 60 years after they closed.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone

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The death of a monarch who has reigned for 70 years is bound to lead to a solemn time. And it was inevitable that the Liberal Democrat Conference would be cancelled once the date of the Queen's funeral was announced, as I have already argued.

That said, I find the argument put forward by Sarah Olney on Lib Dem Voice - that holding our conference would somehow imperil the peaceful succession of Charles III - bizarre.

And this enthusiasm for cancelling events to display our grief - or perhaps to avoid criticism - can go too far.

One example is the Last Night of the Proms. Yes, a traditional Last Night would have struck the wrong note, but surely it would have been possible to put together a programme of music that would have expressed the national feeling?

Another example is the cancellation of children's football. Taking part in a minute's silence before the game would have given the young players a memory that might stay with them for the rest of their lives. 

And, besides the fun of playing, they would not have given up all the benefits football brings from exercise to a bit of male attention in lives that can lack it.

Ours is now a safety-first society, and that has its costs.

The world of chess has been rocked to its foundations

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Absolute scenes in world chess. First, the Georgian former women's world champion Nona Gaprindashvili has won a settlement in her suit against the producers of the television drama The Queen's Gambit. There she was described, quite wrongly, as "a female world champion, who has never faced men".

Meanwhile in men's chess, the world champion Magnus Carlsen has withdrawn from a top tournament after losing to the young American Hans Niemann, Announcing his move on Twitter, he added a video from Jose Mourinho in which The Special One said "If I speak I am in big trouble," when referring to a referee during a post-match press conference.

This was widely taken to be an accusation of cheating against Niemann, but no evidence for this has come forward. Niemann has admitted to a couple of youthful offences in the Wild West that is online chess, but it's hard to see how anyone could cheat in a major over-the-board tournament, given the precautions that are now taken.

The former world champion Gary Kasparov, sounding magisterial, got it right:

Carlsen's withdrawal was a blow to chess fans, his colleagues at the tournament, the organizers, and, as the rumors and negative publicity swirl in a vacuum, to the game. The world title has its responsibilities, and a public statement is the least of them here.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 8, 2022

Carlsen has said no more and unless he does this blog will support Hans Niemann.

Magnus Carlsen, incidentally, is not a happy bunny these days. He recently announced that he will not be defending his world title.

Finally, to return to the subject of the day, here is an article on chess and the royal family.

The Queen, James Bond and Paddington Bear

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Frank Cotterell-Boyce has a lovely piece in the Observer on his experience of working with the Queen on her two late ventures into acting: the James Bond section of the London 2012 opening ceremony and her Platinum Jubilee sketch with Paddington.

There was originally no intention that she should appear in the Bond sketch, but when the creative team went to the Palace to discuss it they were told that she wanted to take part. And when they came to film it she said she wanted a line to say.

And appearing in the Paddington sketch must have taken some skill - remember, he was not there when the Queen spoke her lines.

Cotterell-Boyce writes of the significance of that sketch:

It used to be said that millions of people had dreams in which they had tea with the Queen. Even our dream life is going to have to change. Watching her have tea with Paddington will have to do instead. It’s easy to see why that was so powerful. In retrospect, it was valedictory. A woman waving a happy goodbye to her grandchildren and great grandchildren, an image of love and a happy death.

But Paddington is an evacuee, a refugee, one-time prisoner, pretty much every category of need that is mentioned in Matthew 25. Here, he is being welcomed with tea and good manners. This is a strong statement of a set of values that are not uncontested in the corridors of power. To have them exemplified so joyfully at such a moment meant something.

And I shall use this brilliant quotation from Milne myself, possibly quite often:

We're going to be seeing a lot of that flag in the next few days. I don't know how I’m going to feel about this. A flag carefully placed in the background of a cabinet minister’s Zoom room makes me think of AA Milne’s definition of a patriot as "someone who hates everything about the country apart from its flag".