The murder of Charles Walton at Lower Quinton in 1945

You can't beat the local by-election previews that Andrew Teale posts every week.

Yesterday there was an election in the Lib Dem held Quinton ward of Stratford-upon-Avon District Council. (Don't worry: we held it.) I wondered if Andrew would know about a notorious murder that took place there.

I needn't have worried. Andrew wrote in this week's preview:

The Quinton ward extends north-east from here to take in the village of Lower Quinton. This was the scene for the 1945 murder of Charles Walton, with local rumour having it that he had been ritually killed and that witchcraft was involved. 

Despite the involvement of the Metropolitan Police officer DS Robert Fabian of the Yard as chief investigating officer, no-one was ever prosecuted for Walton’s death and Warwickshire Constabulary class it as their oldest unsolved murder case.

My suspicion is that – as in many an Agatha Christie plot – what appeared to be an extraordinary killing was in fact an ordinary one with mundane financial motives. But, like poor Bella in the Wych Elm, this murder has gone down in West Midlands history.

For a short introduction of the case, you can try the relevant episode of Punt PI. But what I really recommend is the three-part investigation of it by Hypnogoria. I like its observation that it's common to come across, when researching your family history, to come across people who have left no mark on official records.

The case also inspired a new film called The Last Sacrifice. I've not seen it, but the trailer below plays up the idea that the murder of Charles Walton inspired the folk horror cinema that flourished two or three decades later.

I found the press cutting above in my folder of newspaper stories about Dennis O'Neill. The juxtaposition of the two stories is positively spooky, but that was the West Midlands in 1945.

Reggie the Antisocial Swan of Avon finds love in Devon

There's a happy sequel to a recent Headline of the Day. Reggie the black swan, who was removed from Stratford-upon-Avon because he was "terrorising" other birds and tourists, has found a new home – and love – in Devon.

BBC News reports:

Donald Phillips, from the Dawlish Waterfowl Centre, said Reggie had "settled in very well" and had already found a mate.

He explained: "I'd put him into the enclosure with two females and he just walked up to them and they sort of followed him around and there was no aggression at all ... he was just as good as gold." ...

"I selected one of the females and I moved him on to a farm where they've got a big lake and ducks and he settled in very well. I think he's picked his swan, his wife-to-be."

One of the judges was heard to blow his nose loudly.

It's worth noting that Reggie was moved from a Liberal Democrat constituency to a Liberal Democrat constituency. Manuela Perteghella could have handed him over to Martin Wrigley at a service station on the M5.

The Antisocial Swan of Avon

This just in from BBC News:

A black swan has been removed from a historic town after it spent nine months "terrorising" other birds and tourists.

The bird - named Reggie by locals - was captured by swan warden Cyril Bennis in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire and will be rehomed at a centre in Devon.

Mr Bennis said the capture was "what has to be done" after the bird's behaviour, which included disrupting nesting swans.

A town resident added: "He's terrorised everyone else but we love him so it will be sad to see him go, but it's probably better for the river that he's gone."

A friend of Reggie told this blog: "He's a real gent. He never attacked kids nor nothink like that. They framed him up something rotten."

Manuela Perteghella: "Young people want closer ties with Europe - they know the rights they have lost"

Manuela Perteghella believes Britain will one day rejoin the European Union. 

Asked in an interview with the Europe Street news agency if she thinks such a move will ever take place, the Liberal Democrat MP for Stratford upon Avon replies:

"In my opinion yes, because it is important for the UK to have partners who care about the future of Europe. ... When I speak in schools, it is clear that young people want closer ties with Europe. They know the rights they have lost with Brexit and they want to experience Europe without hurdles, so I hope the new generation will take us back into the EU, where our place is."

She is also critical of Labour's and others' rhetoric on immigration:

"The language that we have heard recently reopened old wounds and reignited the toxic debate of the Brexit campaign, while immigrants have over the centuries enriched massively British society. We need to have an honest debate and my mission will be even more to highlight this."

And, as an expert in the translation of British drama, including Shakespeare’s work, Manuela speaks of the "huge honour" of representing his birthplace in parliament.

Ed Davey: "It feels even better than the general election"

Embed from Getty Images

Ed Davey gets a good write up in the Guardian today and is not afraid to sound optimistic about Thursday's local election:

According to Davey, the general election trend of less ideologically minded Conservative voters fleeing a party they see as overly weighted towards populism and culture wars has shown no signs of slowing under Badenoch.

"People who were lifelong Conservatives haven't forgiven them, they're not impressed by the leader, and some are put off by this talk of some sort of arrangement with Reform," he said.

And:

While Davey is making no predictions, he is scornful about Farage’s success thus far in building up a Lib Dem-style on-the-ground army.

"This is just anecdotal, but Reform have tried door-knocking one or two places, and they got such a hostile reception from quite a lot of doors, they quickly give up. So they’re not fighting the campaign that we do."

The Guardian correspondent, Peter Walker, make a good point when he says these elections are different for the Lib Dems. We are used to winning council elections as a way of building up strength so we can eventually make a realistic challenge for the Westminster seat.

But on Thursday we will be hoping to strengthen our grip on many of the seats we gained at last year's general election by getting more councillors elected there.

Let me end with a word in support of Ed Davey's stunts for the media. They show that the party has grasped that if the media can get good photos or video from an event, they are much more likely to cover it.

I remember the EU referendum campaign, when the Leave campaign showed much more awareness of this than Remain did. In fact the only thing I can remember from the Remain campaign is George Osborne threatening to put everyone's taxes up.

As Walker says:

Days before the local elections, with Kemi Badenoch demanding apologies over gender identity and Nigel Farage complaining about mental illness diagnoses, Ed Davey was quietly getting on with what he perhaps does best: having fun.

In a converted shed near Stratford-upon-Avon, the Liberal Democrat leader was joking with photographers as he made chocolate truffles alongside Manuela Perteghella, his party’s MP for the formerly true-blue constituency.

The Joy of Six 1337

Susie Courtalt says the rise of toxic masculinity and the war on 'woke' threaten women’s rights around the world: "For whatever reason, and there may be many, a new archetype of leader has emerged in the world and is fuelling this trend. Pressure put on the Romanian authorities to free the Tate brothers and allow them to fly to the USA can only be explained by the new incumbents in the White House and Elon Musk’s continued support of them." 

"The most striking aspect of the new guidelines is the missing subject: class. The word 'class' does not appear once in the document. Nor does 'poverty'. Yet, few issues are more pertinent in evaluating offenders’ social background." Kenan Malik on the real two-tier justice system.

"This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research." Dorothy Bishop reviews 'Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research' by Csaba Szabo.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams celebrates Robert Marsham’s 'Indications of Spring'. This 222-year record of flora and fauna events on one Norfolk estate still informs climate studies today.

Mark Carrigan warns academics that Bluesky will trap them, just as Twitter did in the past.

"It’s my guess that, even within ten years, the painting was an embarrassment to the Perrots - not because it was idolatrous, but because the Book of Tobit was relegated to the Apocrypha . ... The presence of Tobias’s dog, together with the exorcism of an evil spirit by burning a fish’s innards, added to idea that the Apocrypha was full of 'shameful lies, horrible blasphemies, vain vanities, plain contradictions, ridiculous fooleries'." Annette Rubery goes to see an Elizabethan wall painting in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Manuela Perteghella, Stratford-upon-Avon and John Profumo

Liberal Democrat Voice is doing sterling work posting the maiden Commons speeches of all those new Lib Dem MPs. It's a particularly valuable feature if you write a satirical column about the party that purports to be the diary of an Edwardian peer from Rutland who has somehow survived into the 21st century.

One of the new MPs featured today is Manuela Perteghella from Stratford-on-Avon, who reminded the house:

Although I am proud to be the first female MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, I am not the first to bring Italian heritage to the role. That distinction belongs to another of my predecessors, John Profumo, who beat me to it - although I plan on a much quieter stay in the history books.

This gives me a chance to recommend Bringing the House Down, David Profumo's book about his parents - John Profumo and the actress Valerie Hobson.

Accounts of the Profumo Affair often suggest that John Profumo was a future prime minister whose political career was ended by scandal. But David makes it clear that his father was not a good minister and had done well to get as far as he had.

But John kept his sense of humour through it all. As Tim Adams' Guardian review of Bringing the House Down records:

He recounts a telling little story of wheeling his father into Edward Heath's memorial service not long before his death: 'It's the great and the good - and us,' Profumo senior noted.

Lib Dems to target more seats at the general election

Anna Gross writes in the Financial Times:

The Liberal Democrat party is stepping up campaigning in more than a dozen seats predominantly in the south of England following recent by-election wins, as it starts to broaden its ambitions ahead of the general election expected next year.

Dave McCobb, the director of field campaigns, presented a paper to members on Tuesday night that identified areas where support for the Lib Dems was growing, giving the party a good chance of pushing out the Conservatives at the next election.

Most of these constituencies are in the party’s former heartland in the south-west of England, including Taunton Deane and West Dorset, as well in Surrey in the south-east and the seat of Stratford-on-Avon in the West Midlands.

As someone who was at the meeting has told the FT, some of these seats were not thought to be winnable even a few months ago. Certainly, the three that Gross mentions here have not been much discussed in the media.

The worry, as ever, is that we will become too ambitious, spread our resources too thinly and suffer a series of narrow defeats. But this optimism seems better founded than that which fuelled the our 2019 campaign, which was based on wishful thinking and some unlikely opinion poll findings.