Liberal England

Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year 2014

"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall
"Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman
"A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling
and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

The Rockingbirds: Restless

The Rockingbirds were that rare thing, a North London country rock band. They gained some success in the early Nineties, split in 1995, refo...

Monday, June 16, 2025

Market Harborough goes bananas on Carnival day

Saturday was Carnival day in Market Harborough. The crowds were so large in town that I gave up trying to photograph the parade and headed f...

A boiler explosion at Stonton Wyville in 1862 killed four men

Embed from Getty Images After covering its lost gardens and the drought of 1947 , we're going back to Stonton Wyville. Reader's voi...

Family's horror seeing tourists eat from saucepans in idyllic Cotswolds village

Gloucestershire Live wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale of tourism in Bourton-on-the-Water. The judges left me to comment, so...

Sunday, June 15, 2025

In 1946 there was a plan to move Snailbeach village to a new site

Here's a discovery. In 1946 there was a plan to move the Shropshire lead-mining village of Snailbeach to a new site nearer Minsterley. I...

The Joy of Six 1372

"What's happening in Gaza is a humanitarian and existential tragedy for the people living there, a moral and political disaster for...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “Oh Mr Meadowcroft, you’re so sweet!”

I hadn't been intending to do this. Instead, I had been dreaming of a public row at Liberal Democrat HQ that would give me a pretext for...

Scaffold: Liverpool Lou

I remember liking this when it came out in 1974 - it reached no. 6 in the singles chart that June. One of the members of Scaffold was Mike ...

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Prince William's billionaire pal dies after swallowing bee while playing polo

The Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award. This story, the judges were at pains to emphasise. is not funny. Few of the stories under th...

Liberal England: My failure to make a television detective of Jeremy Thorpe

I'm no Nancy Banks Smith, but if you ask me this wasn't one of the better ideas to emerge from the fecund brain of Lord Bonkers. Tha...

Friday, June 13, 2025

A journey along the disused Market Harborough to Newark railway

It was building the Great Northern and London & North Western Railway (GN&LNWJR) that brought my hero J.W. Logan MP to the Market Ha...

The Joy of Six 1371

"In cases of adult rape, it takes the police an average of 344 days to decide whether to press charges (for all other crimes, it is 41 ...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: We feed them sausages and plum bread

I'm pleased that Sister Sid is doing so well, but I worry about those Lincolnshire refugees. I don't know how long they are put up ...

Thursday, June 12, 2025

The life and death of Walnut Tree Viaduct in South Wales

This is a great video that tells you a lot about railway politics and engineering in 19th-century Wales and also finds some atmospheric rema...

Moderate Tory MPs are talking to Lib Dems MPs about joining us

Some Conservative MPs could be tempted to defect to the Liberal Democrats over their leadership's opposition to the European Convention ...

Poundland sold for less than £1

In what I think is a Liberal England first, the Financial Times wins our Headline of the Day Award. The photograph shows a branch of the ch...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Rescuing fallen women or scourging himself

This is why I stay working for Lord Bonkers despite everything: these precious snippets of Liberal history that somehow never make it into t...

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Furnival's of Fleckney, Nina Stibbe and Bryan Magee

Nina Stibbe , another member of the Market Harborough school of literature, once wrote about Fleckney in the Guardian: Fleckney became indus...

Tim Buckley: Dolphins

Jeff Buckley died at 30, his father Tim at 28. I felt sorry for Jeff, often discussed with reference to a father who hardly bothered with hi...

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Commander Gideon, Dr Simon Sparrow and the girls of St Trinian's

Lord Bonkers continues to be untroubled by issues of low self-esteem. Those ubiquitous - and least on his estate - birds the hamwee and the...

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