Blacked-up aristocrat crashes into lamppost while three times drink-drive limit

The Telegraph provides our Headline of the Day.

Only in Grimsby...

Disused railway stations in Cornwall

There have been many more of these slideshows on Liberal England - all of them posted in the days when the Liberal Democrats had 57 MPs.

They are: Devon, Bedfordshire, North Lincolnshire, East Sussex, Leicestershire, Herefordshire, Hampshire, Cumbria,Cambridgeshire, Kent and Lincolnshire.

Tim Farron could drop "Democrats" from the party's name

View image | gettyimages.com

Tim Farron, last heard of taking soundings about whether he should stand as leader of the Liberal Democrats, makes a lunge for the erogenous zone of the party in tomorrow's Telegraph:

Mr Farron, one of the party’s only eight MPs, is considering running his leadership campaign on a ticket of making a clean break from the recent past. ... 

Any decision to drop the “Democrats” from the party’s name would draw a line under the party’s links with the Social Democratic Party which dates from the late 1980s. 

One source said: “The Liberal party has a long history and it is important to capitalise on that. We are the party of Gladstone, Lloyd George and Beveridge and we should be proud of that.” 

Speaking in an interview on BBC radio, Mr Farron, the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, repeatedly referred to the party as “the Liberals”. 

He said that he wanted to “create a sense of purpose and meaning behind the Liberals” ahead of next year’s elections in Scotland and Wales.

As someone who joined the Liberal Party before the SDP was even thought of, I find this idea very tempting.

Norman Lamb launches his leadership bid

This afternoon Norman Lamb confirmed that he is standing for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

According to BBC News:

He told BBC Look East he made his decision to stand after "an awful lot" of soul-searching in a period of "complete exhaustion" after the election. 

But he concluded he should do it, he said, as "obviously the party suffered devastating results last Thursday. It's critically important that we reconnect and... have an effective advocate for what modern liberalism is all about." 

He added: "As health minister I put body and soul into it and I would do the same for this job."

The first online evidence of his campaign is the Twitter account Lamb for Leader, which has retweeted an impressive number of endorsements this evening.

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Daisy Benson reports her impressions of the election campaign: "So in two totally different constituencies two different political parties were campaigning against Lib Dem MPs – Labour as part of their narrow ‘35% strategy’ and Tories for their own 23 seat strategy. Politically, we were caught between a pincer movement – left and right."

"It’s time for constitutional reform – of the Liberal Democrats. We need to redesign our party structures to make them fit for the challenges we face." George Potter suggests six ways of doing it.

Phil Rodgers explains why he is rejoining the Liberal Democrats.

"Farage’s claim to authenticity was always a curious one. How could this former commodity trader portray himself as the ‘man in the street’? Surely he was closer to the ‘Establishment’ than many ... of the main party leaders." David Bates on the ABC of Nigel Farage.

Following the election result, Eddie Procter calls on the English to throw off the Norman yoke.

Dezeen mourns the loss of the brutalist Pimlico School.

Rigby Graham 1931-2015

I am very sorry to hear of the death of the Leicester artist Rigby Graham.

The other day I blogged about my sixth-form Saturday job in a second-hand bookshop in the late Seventies. Rigby Graham was one of our regular visitors and was a lovely man.

Once I had been poured a tiny whisky by the owners and he complained it was just a dirty glass.

You can read more about Rigby Graham on the University of Leicester site and see his painting on the Goldmark Gallery site (from which I have borrowed this picture.)

Ella Fitzgerald: Spring can really hang you up the most

The other day I picked up Cosmo Landesman's Starstruck from the sale table in Waterstones. In it he mentions that his mother wrote this song,

I think it makes a good tribute to defeated candidates everywhere.

David Howarth on what the Liberal Democrats must do now

Hindsight makes us all experts, but the problem with the Liberal Democrats supporting tuition fees was not just that it involved breaking a pledge.

That decision also alienated many of the natural supporters of our values..

David Howarth puts it well in a new post for the Social Liberal Forum:

One of the most disastrous aspects of the Clegg era was that just at the point the party was starting to develop a loyal core vote – roughly speaking, graduates, prospective graduates and the parents and grandparents of graduates – it launched an all-out attack on those very voters. 

But those voters are still there and still share our values. In fact, there are too few other people who share our values to make us a viable political force without them.

The whole post - five things we must never do again and three things to do now - is worth reading.

Alistair Carmichael rules out standing for the Lib Dem leadership

View image | gettyimages.com

Alistair Carmichael has been talking to the Shetland Times about Thursday's general election results in Scotland:

“Something has happened up here. We’re in new territory – we’ve got a competitive politics. The referendum campaign was, on the face of it, lost up here from our point of view. 

“But something changed that engaged more people, that told people that change was possible. 

“There are significant movements towards a more participative, accountable, transparent politics we needed.”

He has also said that he will not be standing in the forthcoming Liberal Democrat leadership contest:

But Mr Carmichael ruled himself out of trying to become the new party leader himself. “I’ve said this before, and nothing has changed in that regard.”

When Alistair spoke about the leadership in February I thought I detected some wriggle room in his denial of interest, but it seems he has decided not to make use of it.

My favoured dark-horse candidates for the next Lib Dem leader have long been Alistair and Steve Webb, but (for different reasons) neither will be standing.

So it looks as though it will be Tim Farron vs Norman Lamb.

Thanks to Mark Pack.

Chris Leslie demonstrates how to get ahead in politics

Chris Leslie first swam into my consciousness by starring in an an anecdote about the first parliamentary session following Labour's landslide victory of May 1997.

Here is Dan Hodges retailing a version of it:

Sitting on the front bench, Tony Blair surveyed the massed ranks of his parliamentary intake and then lent over to Gordon Brown. 

“It’s weird,” he said “but there’s a guy back there who’s the splitting image of the boy who does your photocopying.” 

“That is him,” Brown replied. “He’s your new MP for Shipley”.

Informed speculation this weekend has it that Leslie, now MP for Nottingham East, will be appointed as his party's new shadow chancellor on Monday,

Which puts me in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan...

Liberal Democrats maintain control of Oadby and Wigston

In all the carnage of Thursday, we should not overlook the achievement here in Leicestershire of Oadby and Wigston Liberal Democrats in maintaining control of the district council.

The new balance of the council is:

Liberal Democrat 19
Conservative 6
Labour 1

This is the first time Labour has been represented on the council for three decades.

Oadby and Wigston has been run by the Lib Dems since 1991, but then this is an area with a strong Liberal tradition.

The old Wigston UDC was run by the Liberal Party in Jo Grimond's day.

Amusing advice from journalists to the Liberal Democrats

It is going to take a while for us Liberal Democrats to adjust to our new situation.

And it seems that the same is true of political journalists. Here are two comments on the party which made me smile today.

First, the usually admirable George Parker on the Financial Times site:

But Mr Farron, odds on favourite for the leadership in a small field, is regarded with suspicion by Mr Clegg’s supporters, who fear he would lead the party back to its comfort zone of opposition.

I fear that, whoever the new leader is, the party has been led back to the comfort zone of opposition before he takes office.

And then there was this tweet from the deputy web editor at the New Statesman:

Lib Dems now have no women MPs. Will they finally accept that they should use all-women shortlists? #GE2015

— Anoosh Chakelian (@AnooshChakelian) May 9, 2015

I have blogged in support of all-women shortlists myself, but I am not sure they are the party's most pressing problem facing the party this weekend.

Still, if only Anoosh could have told us the 8 seats out of 57 that we were going to hold in this election, we could have made sure we had women candidates in the right places.

You have to laugh, even if its only hysteria.

The Spencer Davis Group on A Whole Scene Going

While I was away in Liverpool something rather wonderful happened. A film about the Spencer Davis Group from 1966 appeared on Youtube.

After shots of them running (geddit?!) it features an interview with a genteel sounding Spencer Davis intercut with Steve Winwood playing the amazing Stevie's Blues.

David admits he enjoys being a pop star, but he also accepts that Winwood will move on one day. He did the following year, and Davis's days in the charts were over.

The film turns out to come from a series called A Whole Scene Going and was broadcast on 16 March 1966.

You can read the running order on the Wiped News site. Those were the days when England really did swing like a pendulum do.

Did Labour hatred of the Lib Dems cost Ed Balls his career?

If Ed Balls' seat was under threat, what were all those activists doing in Sheffield Hallam?

— Atul Hatwal (@atulh) May 8, 2015

Atul Hatwal from Labour Uncut asked a good question.

Several Liberal Democrats tweeted yesterday evening that Labour activists were delighted when the Tories defeated a Liberal Democrat minister.

Well, we all get excited at counts, but this does rather suggest that Labour's hatred of us Lib Dems was warping their judgement.

Could it be that they got so excited by the prospect of defeating Nick Clegg that they neglected Ed Balls seat elsewhere in Yorkshire?

This would have been foolish both because Labour does not win seats like Sheffield Hallam and because there was speculation back in 2010 that Ed Balls could be vulnerable in Morley and Outwood.

David Boyle on the radical heart of Liberalism

Where do I begin? How and where do we being to fight back?

David Boyle has at least begun to map the problems we face by describing what has happened to the Liberal Democrats in recent years:

I remember how thrilled I was to sweep through a neighbourhood delivering Focus leaflets with 20 or so other young people, at a jog. We believed in the inevitability of the cause – to take power in order to give it away. We felt like the political wing of the counterculture that grew up at the same time. 

Since then, I’ve watched those I ran with age at the same rate as me (possibly even faster) and take their seats in parliament. I saw them wrestle with government. 

What happened? There was a clue in the email I received yesterday morning from one of the party’s radical stars of the 1990s, taking exception to the slogan “stability, unity, decency”. 

“I joined the Liberal party because I hungered for change,” he wrote, “radical change to make the world a better place, not to keep things as they are.” 

The problem is that the trauma of coalition moulded the party into a deeply pragmatic force, provided them with the dullest manifesto in political history, with all the hallmarks of having been written in Whitehall.

Good luck to all Liberal Democrats

I shall be away in Liverpool for the next three days with my day job. I don't know how much blogging I shall be able to do, but will be around on Twitter.

Because of this, my mother's frailty and my own slightly dodgy health recently, I have not been as active in this election campaign as I would have liked.

So let me take this chance to wish all Liberal Democrat candidates and activists the very best of luck on Thursday.

As to what happens afterwards... let us remember the most important rule of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine Club: "To be true to each other whatever happens."

Harborough's Labour candidate backed the death penalty

The other day, when it was revealed that Ukip's candidate for Harborough had spent part of the campaign on holiday in Florida, Labour's candidate Sundip Meghani was outraged:

"Standing for election to the House of Commons is not a joke or something you do in your spare time. "... It is a disgrace."

I suggested when the story broke that Meghani was being ungrateful. Let me explain why.

Meghani first came to this blog's notice as one of two Leicester Labour councillors to back the death penalty.

He said in August 2011:

It's a complicated issue but I'm in favour of capital punishment in some circumstances. I think it may be wrong to restrict the death penalty solely to the murderers of children and police, because that gives some lives more value than others. But multiple killers should be eligible for execution."

I doubt that went down well in Labour circles, but Meghani and Barbara Potter did find one supporter in Leicester Mercury:

Isn't it refreshing that two elected Labour councillors can express an opinion? Well obviously not? 

I thought the days of Comrade Blair were long gone but obviously they haven't. 

As a Conservative voter at the last election I applaud Labour Councillors Meghani and Potter for their honest and forthright opinions. 

How can the Labour Party discipline councillors who are closer to the electorate than they ever will be for expressing an opinion (Mercury, September 7)? 

I am a firm believer that the death penalty is a solution to serious crimes and the weak Liberal Democrats are not helping this country with their wet human rights attitude. 

Mark Hunt, Oadby

And the writer of that letter must surely be the Mark Hunt who is fighting Harborough for Ukip (when he is not on holiday in Florida.

I wonder if Mr Meghani is comfortable with the supporters his views attract?

Incindentally, his fellow enthusiast for the noose, Barbara Potter, has had her own problems with the law.

She is currently standing as an independent candidate for mayor of Leicester while wearing an electronic tag.

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Nick Barlow stands up for localism against Eric Pickles.

Jackson Lears stands up for liberal education against neoliberalism.

More than 50,000 families have been silently shipped out of London boroughs in the past three years, says Daniel Douglas,

Ragged University argues that modern housing developments have been made little else but a stage for isolated family living

"The 25 men who participated in the incident swore one another to secrecy, and their names were never reported. In higher circles around Marietta, though, their identities were generally well known, for they had nothing to fear." Steve Oney on America's only anti-Semitic lynching.

"Oh for the lost days of our youth when a small boy could come skipping out of a chemist's shop with a manual of witchcraft in one hand and a bag of bomb ingredients in the other." Adrian Bott rediscovers How to Make Magic from 1974.

The importance of Magna Carta to British society today

Forget David Starkey. The best guide to the importance of Magna Carta to us 900 years on is Marriott Edgar.

Ben E. King: Stand By Me

Sometimes the obvious choice is the right one. Ben. E. King, who composed (with Leiber and Stoller) and sang Stand By Me died this week.

Today the song is seen as an outright classic, but when it was first released in 1961 it got no higher than 27 in the UK singles chart.

It reached no. 1 in 1987 when it was re-released after being used in a Levi jeans television commercial.

This is not the only case of that brand rewriting musical history.

In 1973 Johnnie Walker (then by far the coolest of the daytime Radio One DJs) played The Joker by the Steve Miller Band for months in an unsuccessful attempt to make it a hit in Britain. But it reached no. 1 after it was used in another Levi commercial.

Back to Ben E. King... Since you ask, the E stood for Earl.