How the Uncle books anticipated the Murdoch press

It is always good to discover another fan of Uncle. The other day Cristina Odone wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

If the worst came to the worst, and her teachers suddenly joined the three-quarters of a million strikers on Thursday, I can entertain my daughter with her favourite “Uncle” books. Or rather, with the early volumes from that quirky Sixties series. The three later books are only available second hand, and are going for more than £1,000. 

One reason, according to devotees (and J P Martin’s works featuring a fabulously wealthy elephant and his loathsome foe Beaver Hateman command a cult following), is that publisher Jonathan Cape finds the series “classist”. Uncle is unashamed about his wicked wealth, and that, apparently, makes for uncomfortable reading in our egalitarian times.

I don't know if that is the real reason, but the continued obscurity of this wonderful series of children's books does need an explanation. And I own copies of two of those three later books, but they are battered ex-library copies and I doubt very much if they would fetch £1000 apiece.

As we are talking of Uncle, this is a good opportunity to salute the Revd J.P. Martin for his foresight in anticipating the Murdoch press in the shape of the character Hitmouse:

Hitmouse, a wretched little person who is the chief reporter on the Badfort News and who lives in a Nissen hut outside Badfort, was sitting by Hateman. He was bristling, as usual, with skewers and writing in a hating book.

That is from Uncle Cleans Up. In Uncle and his Detective we learn that he makes notes for the Badfort News in his hating books and never travels without it.

The parallels with the Murdoch press are uncanny.

Mind you, the tabloid press is not without its attractions. And Uncle, while unquestionably good, can be terribly pompous. If I lived in his castle of Homeward, I think I would read the Badfort News, despite the terrible things it says about him.

And, moving with the times, it seems you can read the Badfort Times online for yourself.

Peter Ashley's Unmitigated Stamford

With thanks to Wartime Housewife.

The Browns and the Murdochs

In his speech in the Commons yesterday Gordon Brown spoke of

those at News International who took the freedom of the press as a licence for abuse, who cynically manipulated our support of that vital freedom as their justification, and who then callously used the defence of a free press as the banner under which they marched in step, as I say, with members of the criminal underworld.

Fair comment and it is impossible not to have sympathy for Gordon and Sarah Brown over the disgusting way that the Sun exposed their son's illness.

But as Matthew d'Ancona shows in the Evening Standard tonight, the Browns' behaviour in the light of this criminality and callousness was quite bizarre:

Flick through the pages of Sarah Brown's memoir, Behind the Black Door, and, time after time, you come across warm mentions of the Murdoch family and of Rebekah Wade. A few examples: in October 2007, less than a year after the Sun's story about Fraser, Rupert and Wendi Murdoch are visiting Chequers - with the result that, instead of speaking live on Sunday, Gordon pre-records his interview with Andrew Marr announcing that there will be no snap general election. Elsewhere in the book, Murdoch is "a very solicitous host and very touching in the affection he shows for Wendi". Mrs Murdoch, for her part, is thanked in the book's Acknowledgments.

In June 2008, she "comes to Chequers with a group of mutual girlfriends. It is a girls-only night and we have the excuse of celebrating Wendi's upcoming fortieth birthday. The guest list includes Emma Freud, Shriti Vadera, Claudia Winkelman and Kirsty Young, as well as Elisabeth Murdoch and Rebekah Wade, who both have fortieths to celebrate, too….. ….It turns out that Rebekah has sent a platter of gourmet cheese and booked the guy who sold her the cheese as he happened to be an out-of-work magician."

As d'Ancona suggests, the answer is not straightforward hypocrisy but something closer to Orwellian "doublethink": "to survive and prosper, politicians and, by extension, their spouses, often have to accept and believe directly contradictory propositions".

Still, as Nick Clegg said earlier today, you sensed a whiff of history being rewritten in Brown's speech. He would have liked to be the brave loner who stood up to Murdoch's newspapers, but the reality was very different.

Harborough Lib Dem councillors table motion of no confidence in local NHS Trust

Liberal Democrat members of Harborough District Council have tabled a motion of no confidence in NHS Leicestershire County and Rutland Primary Care Trust (PCT) over its mishandling of the redevelopment of St Luke's Hospital in Market Harborough to the authority's next full meeting.

The motion, to be debated at the next full meeting of the council, reads:

On The Matter of the Harborough Hospital

The anger and dismay at the inability of the PCT to provide/complete Harborough's long awaited new/refurbished hospital and in particular the modular minor procedure/endoscopy unit is cause for deep concern. The PCT has a record of broken promises and missed deadlines on this matter, and in our opinion has badly let down the people of Harborough.

As the Elected body representing the People of Harborough this Council registers its lack of confidence in the PCT, its Executive and Board in this matter.

If the Council is mindful to support this Notice of Motion a letter outlining the decision of this Council should be sent to the Chairman of the PCT with copies to our Local MP and the Health Minister.

GUEST POST Grandparents or adoption: who would you choose?

Peter Hulme, Campaigns Officer for Grandparents Plus, introduces the charity's campaign Keep Families Together.

Who would you want to bring up your children if you weren’t around? Some readers might not have thought much about it. But for many others this will be a question that has deeply affected you personally or someone close to you.

There are very good reasons for trying to keep children with grandparents or other family members if the worst should happen. Our charity, Grandparents Plus, is campaigning for more support for grandparents and other family members to Keep Families Together and to stop children being needlessly taken into care or put up for adoption.

It is estimated that 300,000 children in the UK aren’t able to live with their parents. Most of them are living with grandparents, older siblings or other family members. This could be because parents have died or because of parental drug or alcohol misuse, illness, domestic violence, disability, imprisonment, abuse or neglect of children or a combination of these factors.

Grandparents Plus has launched an interactive video entitled “Who would you choose for me?” to highlight the issue. It features a girl who cannot live with her parents and must either be raised by her grandparents or placed with an adoptive family. The viewer gets the chance to decide how her story should end.



Policy makers and service providers all too often fail to recognize the contribution of grandparents and other family carers in raising children. In many cases they don’t get the support they need. In other cases they are obstructed from raising their grandchildren because of age discrimination by children’s services.

Grandparents Plus aims to fight this injustice through our Keep Families Together campaign. Our research shows that when deciding where children should be placed local authorities often give greater weight to the ‘permanency’ of adoption instead of recognising the love, stability and family links that grandparents and other family carers can provide. Families are being torn apart because adoption is seen as the default option.

Some grandparents are afraid of getting support from social services because they fear their grandchild will be taken away. One grandparent, a former district nurse, told us: “I didn’t want [social services] to be involved because I worked with them for 30 years and they often make the wrong decision.”

In other cases grandparents have had to spend thousands of pounds on legal costs to prevent their children being adopted. You can read more about these cases in our new report Too Old to Care?

We recognize the value of adoption for many children. But placement with family and friends is usually preferable because of the continuity of family relationships and sense of identity – as well as love and stability - that they can provide for a child. High rates of placement breakdown for adoption (from 10-50 per cent) reflect the fact that it is just not that easy to “transplant” a child from one family to another.

Grandparents and other family carers make a massive contribution to society by giving children a secure future and save the country billions by keeping them out of care. But they need more support from local and national government. They should be recognised as carers, protected from welfare cuts, given a national allowance and access to respite care.

State interference can be catastrophic when children are taken away from families unnecessarily. It is far more sensible for children’s services to work in partnership with the wider family to support those who are willing to step in to care for children. We all need to ask ourselves: “What future would I want for my child?”

Back our campaign to support family and friends carers: Keep Families Together.

Further reading

• www.keepfamiliestogether.org.uk
• Real stories of grandparent carers: Tony and Christine (video)
• Metropolitan Mum: reaction to "Who would you choose for me?"
• Virtual Granny: reaction to "Who would you choose for me?"
• Third Sector praise for the Keep Families Together campaign

Artdejardin sculpture garden, Wing

After seeing Wing maze and having lunch at the King's Arms, I visited Artdejardin. The leaflet I picked up there describes it thus:

Artdejardin is the strikingly beautiful garden based in the the picturesque Rutland village of Wing. There are over six beautiful acres of garden, woodland and meadow ... incorporating breathtaking sculptures that reflect and heighten natures finest creations.

The six acres are split between garden, meadow and woodland. Half the fun of the place is the excitement of seeing what is around the next corner, but the garden's website has a list of the artists whose work is on display.

The only disappointment is that you cannot get a cup of tea there. But it seems they do teas in the village hall on Sundays, and Wing Hall, with its cafe and farm shop, is only just outside the village.

Rebekah Brooks and the Chipping Norton Set

Dominic Sandbrook, writing on high50, is not convinced by the theory that Chipping Norton is home to an evil cabal of politicians and journalist who run Britain:

The truth is that Chipping Norton could hardly be a less appropriate headquarters for a Dan Brown-style international conspiracy. In a wildly overwrought column, the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne laid into the “louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral” conspirators, but none of those words really apply to poor old Chippy. Of all the popular Cotswold towns, it is easily the most unpretentious.

You want louche? Try Stow on the Wold. Amoral? Bourton-on-the-Water. Power-hungry? You don’t know power-hungry until you’ve been to Moreton-in-Marsh.

Alan Reid welcomes exoneration of Mull of Kintyre pilots

Liam Fox, the defence secretary, apologised in the Commons today to the families of two RAF pilots originally blamed for the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash.

Two RAF air marshals had accused Flight Lieutenants Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook of gross negligence over the crash on the Mull of Kintyre in which they died  along with 27 other people. Many of the passengers were among Britain's leading anti-terrorism experts.

The apology came after a fresh review found that Tapper and Cook should not have been blamed and the earlier ruling has now been set aside.

Alan Reid, Lib Dem MP for Argyll and Bute, has welcomed the setting aside of the original verdict:

"So many people – friends and family of the pilots, my predecessor Ray Michie, and others – campaigned for many years to overturn the original verdict which found the two young pilots, who died doing their duty, guilty of gross negligence.

"This review is long overdue. Where the previous Labour government stalled and obstructed, the Coalition Government has ensured that justice has been done.

"I hope that today’s report and conclusions will help many people to put this horrible accident behind them and I join them in remembering and paying tribute to all those who passed away on that disastrous day.”

The setting up of the new inquiry was announced by Nick Clegg when he took prime minister's questions on 8 September 2010.

A record day on Liberal England - thanks to Stephen Fry

On Monday, thanks to my post about Johann Hari and Amazon, this blog had the most visitors in a day since the coalition negotiations were taking place just after last year's general election.

Then yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon I was looking at Statcounter at work (as you do) when I noticed that I was suddenly getting an enormous number of hits on a post about a British Psychological Society report called Understanding Bipolar Disorder and that they were all coming from Twitter.

Bipolar disorder. Twitter. A huge volume of traffic. Could it be?

I went on to Twitter myself and sure enough...

The result was that yesterday this blog had 7887 unique visitors, which is by a long way the most visitors it has ever had in one day.

So thanks to Stephen Fry - and zany_zigzag, of course - I have done a good job of promoting this report for my employer while boosting my own readership. Call it inadvertent synergy.

Lembit Opik and Brian Paddick to sue over phone-hacking

Lembit Opik and Brian Paddick have both been contestants in I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and both hope to the Liberal Democrat candidate in next London Mayoral election.

Now they have something else in common, reports the Guardian. Both are to take legal action over the phone-hacking scandal:

Öpik said that having been to Scotland Yard to review evidence a couple of months ago, there was "no doubt" in his mind that the News of the World had hacked his phone.

"The closure of the newspaper will do nothing to stop the legal action that myself and others are taking … I'm not going to let go of it. Nor will other people," he said.

Paddick told the BBC over the weekend: "I'm not suing News International, I'm suing the police. They failed in their legal duty to investigate properly first time around."

Six of the Best 173

Mark Valladares, writing on Liberal Democrat Voice, is critical of the Lib Dems' English Party: "From defining the time allowed to deal with disciplinary cases, to establishing a framework for the recognition of council groups, from mandatory tithing to restricting the rights of candidates to campaign in selections, the English Liberal Democrats have been hard at work, often producing guidance that would be difficult to absorb by well-organised, enthusiastic Local Parties with lots of volunteers to share the load, but are an appalling burden to small, struggling ones."

Caroline Woodbridge is aghast at plans to ban buses from the centre of Southwold.

Happier transport news from Cambridgeshire, where Meldreth and Shepdreth (two of my favourite station names) are celebrating their 160th birthday and Foxton its 163rd: "Free ice cream will be served at all three stations by Gocold, a business situated at Meldreth Sidings," reports Focus on Bar Hill.

Alex Foster at Niles's Blog risks expulsion from Nottingham by admitting that he has never read Alan Sillitoe.

Andy Boddington at 24dash.com introduces us to the reality of living with bad neighbours: "The rowdiness began last October when the tenant upstairs invited her boyfriend to stay. I knocked on their door and complained about the noise and complained the next day, time and time again. But he simply squared up to me saying he could make as much noise as “he” wants up to eleven in the evening—if only it stopped at eleven rather than 4am or as today 7am! This not simply Saturday night noise. The level of anti-social behaviour is never related to the day of the week, only I suspect to the availability of money for booze and drugs."

NitrateVille pays tribute to Sgt John Sweet, American star of A Canterbury Tale.

The turf maze at Wing

The maze at Wing is one of eight remaining turf labyrinths in England. It stands at the side of a minor road just outside the village. I love the way you can come across such rarities and find them well tended but hardly signposted.

As to how old it is... Britain's Historic Sites says it "may be well over 2500 years old", the Stone Circles site says it is Medieval, while the interpretation board beside the maze makes much of the Viking derivation of the village's name.

Anyway, we know Shakespeare was familiar with turf labyrinths, even if he knew them in decline:

"The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud
and the quaint mazes in the wanton green
for lack of tread are undistinguishable."

Certainly, the Genuki page for Wing says:

By the 19th century the maze seems to have lost some of its magic, for the Leicester and Rutland Directory of 1846 talks of: "An ancient Maze, in which the rustics run at the parish feast".

Johann Hari used Amazon reviews to get revenge

On Saturday I wrote about Johann Hari and Nick Cohen's revelation that those who cross Hari tend to find that their Wikipedia entries are vandalised shortly afterwards.

In that post I directed you to one on the Jack of Kent blog where this story is discussed in much greater depth. Reading that post and the informative comments on it, a fair summation of the state of play would be that the David r who has edited the Wikipedia is the same person as the David Rose about whom Hari has written in the past.

Over the years Hari has given quite specific information about Rose, whose career parallels Hari's to some extent, However, despite this information, none of the commenters on Jack of Kent has been able to prove that Rose really exists.

In my post I mentioned that somewhere at the back of my mind was the memory that Hari had once written pejorative reviews on Amazon. That is a good definition of the wisdom the years bring: you know important and  interesting things but can't quite remember them.

Fortunately, a reader has sent me a cutting from Private Eye - my readers have been very helpful today.

The first cutting is from the Eye for 25 July 2003. It runs in part:

Before Hari's literary talents were as widely known as they are today, he flexed his literary muscles by posting witty and acerbic reviews of the books of Cambridge University professor of Greek literature and culture, Simon Goldhill, on the US version of the online booksellers.

On 4 June 2000, while still studying social and political science at Kings College, Hari posted the following about the prof's Aeschylus: the Orestia: "Pompous drivvel [sic]. This Goldhill man has the prose style of a dead worm and even less warmth and charm. He clearly loves himself. Fine. Nobody else will."

Then on 23 October 2001 he posted a review of Goldhill's Being..."

Sadly, my cutting stops at this point, though Being must be Goldhill's Being Greek Under Rome.

I went to Amazon to see if Hari's reviews were still there. They are not.

But, interestingly, somebody called Anthony Barber from Northumbria has contributed equally abusive reviews of Aeschylus: the Orestia and of Goldhill's Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. He is also damning about Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, a volume which Goldhill helped to edit.

This is intriguing but does not, of course, mean that Hari is Barber.

How Goldhill upset Hari? The next issue of Private Eye discussed this very point:

The last Eye's account of reviews of Cambridge professor Simon Goldhill's books posted on Amazon.com by Johann Hari, one of Britain's most "creative" young journalists,
has caused the prof to abandon his lofty "no comment" stand.

When the Eye asked Hari, now a star columnist on the Independent, why he had posted reviews in 2000 and 2001 describing the Cambridge classics professor's learned tomes on Aeschylus and Hellenism as "pompous drivvel" [sic] and "the bowels of mediocrity", he told us that while a student at Cambridge he had formed the view that Prof Goldhill was "a complete arsehole" after disagreeing with the professor over dinner about the merits of Mo Mowlam (Hari pro, Goldhill anti).

Now Prof Goldhill tells the Eye: "I have never knowingly eaten a meal with Johann Hari. I have certainly never discussed Mo Mowlam with him; there was a disciplinary matter which followed a complaint from the staff about his unpleasantly arrogant rudeness."

Hari's recollection may have been the true one here. He may not be David Rose.

But it is a fact that those who cross Hari fare badly on Amazon as well as Wikipedia.

Later. It seems the "drivvel" review can still be found on the German Amazon site. Thanks to friends on Twitter.

Lembit Opik's latest reality TV series

A reader kindly draws my attention to the latest television appearance by former Lib Dem MP and London Mayoral wannabee Lembit Opik.

He is appearing in cariad@iaith (which I am reliably informed translates Love for Language) on S4C, nightly this week (8.30/9.00 Sky 134, English subtitles available).

The programme's website describes it as follows:

Eight celebrities are set to spend an intense week learning Welsh in an eco-friendly chic campsite in Pembrokeshire.

Among Lembit's fellow contestants are Colin Charvis and Helen Lederer.

My reader comments (a little acidly):

One might ponder that such a course might have been more appropriate before securing Montgomery rather than after losing it.

The Story of the Post Office Underground Railway

This video tells the story of the Post Office Underground Railway, which operated under London's streets between 1927 and 2003 - and always seemed to be on Blue Peter.

britishrailways.tv

News of the World and the victims of 9/11

For some accountable reason, when I checked late last night the front page of this morning's Daily Mirror was not included among Tomorrow's Front Pages on the Sky News site.

The headline on the Mirror's front-page story runs: Phone hacking: 9/11 victims 'may have had mobiles tapped by News of the World reporters'

The details of the claim about 9/11 come some way down the story:

a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.

Now working as a private ­investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim’s phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the ­relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.

“The investigator said the ­journalists seemed particularly interested in getting the phone records belonging to the British victims of the attacks.”

It is all a little tenuous, but if this story turns out to be true, Murdoch will have more to worry about than whether he manages to take over BSkyB.

"The pillars of the establishment are tumbling": Nick Clegg in the Independent

Andrew Grice has a substantial interview with the Liberal Democrat leader in this morning's Independent:

The deputy prime minister senses a rare opportunity in the hacking scandal to carve out a separate niche. The Liberal Democrats have never wooed or been wooed by the media moguls. Unlike David Cameron and Ed Miliband, Mr Clegg did not attend Rupert Murdoch's annual summer party in London last month. He has twice been through the mincer of the ruthless Tory-supporting press machine – during the "Cleggmania" of last year's election and the ill-fated alternative-vote referendum in May.

Grice also pays the obligatory compliment to Nick's powers as a linguist, as well as showing us what he does all day:

Mr Clegg, who speaks in Spanish to his wife Miriam and in Dutch to his mother, is at ease as he conducts most of his Paris meetings in French which is judged "better than Tony Blair's" by impressed officials. Mr Clegg meets François Barin, the French Finance Minister, then delivers a long speech in French to business leaders.

He has a private one-to-one lunch with François Fillon, the prime minister; answers questions at "town hall" meeting staged by the British Council; hosts a reception for defence staff at the British ambassador's residence before squeezing in interviews with the French media. It's not for show; behind the scenes, some serious business is discussed about the ever-closer Anglo-French co-operation on defence.

A cat in a sink yesterday

This is Bessie who, technically speaking, is not my mother's cat...

J.W. Logan's daughter Nora was an imprisoned suffragette

Later. In fact it seems that it was Isobel Logan, Nora's sister, who was imprisoned. Nora was arrested for suffragette activities but was probably not imprisoned. See this note from Nina Boyd.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my hero J.W. Logan - or Paddy Logan - who was the Liberal MP for Harborough  from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916.

I have known for years that one of Logan's daughters, Nora, was a campaigner for women's suffrage. I recently discovered an exchange in Hansard that suggests that went to prison for her beliefs.

The exchange came on 15 July 1908 - a time when Logan had temporarily retired from politics owing to poor health. J.G. Swift MacNeil (MP for South Donegal and, interestingly, a Protestant Irish Nationalist) asked a question of Herbert Gladstone, who was Secretary of State at the Home Office:

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been directed to the statements of Mr. J. W. Logan, who was for many years a Member of this House, that the ladies, of whom his daughter is one, who were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment in connection with the agitation for woman suffrage, are placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, have prison dress, have coarse prison food to eat, are not allowed to have letters or books or newspapers, except one book a week from the prison library, which they are not allowed to read until after 5 p.m., and that the one hour out of the twenty-four in which they are not in solitary confinement is spent half in chapel and the remaining half at exercise in a yard where they are not allowed to speak to any person; in what respects, if any, does this punishment differ from the prison discipline enforced on prisoners guilty of heinous crimes; how many 848 ladies are at present subject to this treatment for offences of a political character which has been inflicted on them in the discretion of a magistrate; and whether he will in these cases advise the exercise of the prerogative of the Crown for the removal or reduction of the cruel and humiliating incidents of such an imprisonment.

The more you learn, the more there is to find out.

Liberal Democrats should support the Labour motion to postpone BSkyB takeover

Last night I tweeted that the Liberal Democrat MPs should support Labour's Commons motion opposing Rupert Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB. Simon Hughes said the same on Sky News this morning, says Liberal Burblings.

Of course they should. As Simon said,  we are "a party that’s never been close to Murdoch, never been in this inner loop." He might have added "unlike Labour".

Simon did go on to say:

"I think we should make clear that we think there should be a postponement of the decision.

“There shouldn’t be a takeover while the investigations are going on and we should let the police investigations run their course.”

I would add that Murdoch, like the supermarkets I complained of the other day, has become over-mighty and the government must act.

We need not fear defeating the government. If there is a majority for postponing the takeover in Commons - and there clearly is - then it must be able to assert itself without bringing down the government.

Besides, largely because of the phone-hacking affair, the Conservatives are slipping in the polls and unlike to welcome the prospect of an election.

As I argued the other day, for the Coalition to work well we need the two parties to be equally scared of at the prospect of a general election. We are now rapidly approaching that happy state of affairs.

The Deighton Family: Travelling Light

They are not quite The Watersons, but while we are talking of musical Yorkshire families we may as well mention the Deightons too.

I remember seeing them playing Travelling Light on television in the 1980s (I think it was a daytime programme it cannot have been the performance in this video), rather liking their home-made feel and feeling a little guilty about it.

Then I discovered that their second LP, Acoustic Music to Suit Most Occasions, had been named Record of the Year by National Public Radio in America and felt vindicated. You can read a bit more about them at All Music.

I cannot recall coming across them after that. There are a number of songs from a Deighton Family "reunion" on Youtube (one is The Girl form the North Country Fair), so I suspect that was because they broke up.

The News of the World makes its excuses and leaves

Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and Wikipedia

The Diary in this week's Spectator is written by Nick Cohen. It is largely devoted to a strange experience that he had after having his book What's Left reviewed by Johann Hari in a small American journal. When the review appeared, Cohen thought it to be riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, so he sent a reply pointing out all the mistakes and it was published.

Cohen thought no more about the incident until he looked at his Wikipedia entry:

As well as learning that I was a probable alcoholic, a hypocrite and a supporter of Sarah Palin, I noticed that all reviews of my work were missing except Hari’s effort. Far from saying that he had made wild allegations and I had responded by quoting from the book, a writer working under the pseudonym ‘David r from Meth Productions’ suggested that I had made wild allegations while Hari ‘had offered quotes from Cohen which he argued backed up his claims’.

It turns out, says Cohen, that the David r had also attacked the Wikipedia entries of Cristina Odone, Francis Wheen, Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson after they have been involved in disagreements with Johann Hari.

So who is this David r?

A blog post by Jack of Kent this afternoon reports some detective work, and this is being taking forward by the commenters. Suffice to say, there are remarkable similarities between the career of David r and that of Hari.

At the back of my mind I seem to recall an old Private Eye story about Hari posting highly critical reviews of the books of people who had displeased him on Amazon. Can anyone confirm it?

In search of the Wise Woman of Wing

Today I have been to Wing in Rutland. The Genuki website about the village tells a remarkable story:

However, one woman in the early 19th century became famous as the 'Wise Woman of Wing'. Amelia Woodcock was a herbalist, and her medicines were sold around the district by a man riding on a donkey as well as from her cottage. Her house no longer exists but 'City Yard' is a reminder of the time when gentry and city folk visited the wise woman. She died about 1850 but her remedies were still for sale in Boots the chemist in Uppingham right up until the 1950s.

The story is expanded in an 1876 issue of Notes and Queries (partial PDF here; scrappy but full text here):

Although she continued to live in her humble cottage at Wing, she was visited daily by persons who - as I am told - "came in their own carriages"; and I am further informed, on good authority, that medical men also came to consult her.

Her patients were taken in regular turn, without distinction of rank ; and they were so numerous that, as she was unable to .see them all on the day that they came to her, many persons were obliged to take lodgings in the village or neighbourhood until the Wise Woman could see them.

And Genuki suggests that "City Yard" in the village is "a reminder of the time when gentry and city folk visited the wise woman". (As far as I can see from the map, City Yard runs behind the King's Arms - last time I visited the village there was a second pub called the Cuckoo but that has now gone - so the footpath sign in the far right of the photo is pointing you that way.)

But I wonder about the story, and not just because my experience is that popular etymology of this sort always turns out to be wrong. It is no surprise to find a post on a family history board from someone who has been trying to research it and come up with very little.

But I have found one indication online that there may be something to the story. A jocular letter to the British Medical Journal from 1853, written by an anonymous doctor, tells of his unsuccessful attempts to gain relief for problems he was experiencing with his hearing:

I must say, from my own experience, that I can excuse anybody for going to various quacks, when "the faculty" have failed to give relief. The desire for cure is so strong in the human breast, that, if I did not believe the "wise woman of Wing" to be a sorceress, I could imagine myself becoming her patient.

So a contemporary writer assumed that his readers would all of heard of the Wise Woman of Wing without further explanation. Maybe there is something in the story after all?

Interestingly, I find that Lord Bonkers took Colin Powell to see the lady as recently as 2002. He may have been confused about the date or his companion's identity, but his observation that she was "Terribly Wise" betrays his characteristic shrewdness.

I said that Andy Coulson would damage David Cameron two years ago

A fair-minder reader writes: You have pointed out that David Cameron, Jenny Jones, Boris Johnson and Guido Fawkes all dismissed News International's phone-hacking as an insignificant issue. But were any more foresighted yourself?

Thank you, fair-minded reader. It happens that I wrote about the matter two years ago to the day. Here is some of what I wrote on 9 July 2009 under the headline News of the World scandal will harm David Cameron:

The BBC quotes a spokeswoman for David Cameron as saying he is "very relaxed" about the story:

"The ramping up of this story is ridiculous - this is about a payment made well after Andy [Coulson] left the News of the World," she said.

But this defence is laughable. The payment was made well after Coulson left the paper, but it was made because of the actions of News of the World journalists while he was editing it.

And as Andrew Neil explained on Newsnight yesterday evening, it is inconceivable that Coulson would not have quizzed his reporters about their methods when they came to him with big stories.

An editor has to be able to judge the truth of a story and how defensible it would be in court. The way the story was come by is central to both these questions.

The irony is that Cameron might well be better off without Coulson. The Conservatives made their come back precisely by ceasing to appeal to the baser instincts of Sun readers and courting the liberal middle class voters they have lost over the last two decades.

But if he insists on trying to hang on to Coulson, David Cameron's squeaky clean image could well be tarnished.

As it turned out Cameron did hang on to Coulson for another 18 months and now his image will be tarnished.

Mark Pack was also on the ball in February 2010. Meanwhile, Old Calder's Almanack also suggests that second favourites may be worth following at Goodwood.

We need to hear from Nick Clegg on News International and phone-hacking

We have heard from David Cameron speak on News International and phone-hacking and we have heard from Ed Miliband. The person we have not heard from is Nick Clegg.

This ought to be a good story for the Liberal Democrats: we have no connections with the Murdoch empire – if only because he has always thought us too insignificant to be worth courting. Instead we have been all but silent.

Nick did get a mention in David Cameron’s press conference this morning – “the Deputy Prime Minister and I have agreed...”, but that sounded like an attempt to get him to share the guilt a little.

Meanwhile we are told that Nick is to say that Britain should be more involved in the Greek bail out. He may well be right, given the consequences for us if the European financial system collapses, but I hope we are not seeing a pattern where Cameron makes the popular announcements and Clegg the unpopular ones.

The News International affair gives the Liberal Democrats an opportunity to assert themselves on it and other issues, stealing a little of the duvet back from the Conservatives, who may well suffer a fall in support. Such a fall will even make the Coalition for stable. For it to work well, it needs the two parties to be equally scared of a general election.

A worrying thought is that Clegg’s advisers have told him that he would no longer carry conviction as the voice of clean politics following the breaking of our foolish pledge over tuition fees. But if that is the case he really has got problems.

John Sweet, star of A Canterbury Tale, has died

One of my very favourite films is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale. It is that rare thing: an essay in English mysticism.

It is almost impossible to classify or describe - you really have to watch it - but Peter von Bagh makes a brave effort:

There are so many moments of wonderment in this film, many of them extremely simple, and just as many made golden by their deep humanity. How the wind waves the hair of the girl; night scenes where only mysterious sounds seem to exist; how the passage of a train into the shadows of a tunnel produces a short moment of ecstasy; the first sight of Canterbury. 

Or one of the greatest sequences in all of cinema: the organ in Canterbury Cathedral, symbolizing the fulfillment and absolute sameness of the everyday and the sacred.

The film starred Eric Portman, Dennis Price, Sheila Sim and Sgt John Sweet, as he was always billed.

John Sweet died on 5 July at the age of 95. There is a tribute to him on the The Powell and Pressburger Pages, where Steve Crook writes:

He was a real G.I., not a professional actor, working on Eisenhower's staff helping with the preparations for D-Day. He did a bit of amateur theatricals and it was in a Red Cross production for the troops that he was spotted by Michael Powell who realised that he would be perfect for the role of the American in their next film, A Canterbury Tale.

After the film was made, John went with the troops to Europe to do his bit for freedom and democracy.

You can see him and Dennis Price in this brief scene from the film...

Clipston: Another wayside telephone exchange

Last spring I discovered a couple of wayside telephone exchanges in Maidwell and Kibworth.

Here is another one. It is more rustic than the other two, which resembled little chapels.

Sarah Teather and the early years curriculum

One of the most characteristic innovations of the last Labour government was the introduction of a national curriculum for children aged 0-5. It was even more characteristic that it should have 69 targets for them to meet.

So it is good to see that Sarah Teather, as children's minister, is proposing to slim this curriculum down. You can read more about this on the Department for Education website.

However, a reader was less than impressed by Sarah's interview on the Today programme the other day and sent me the link so I could listen to it.

I see what he means. For instance, I do not find Sarah's argument that his curriculum has been in place since 2008 at all clinching, given what I though of the government in 2008. Jim Naughtie's incredulity is nearer to my own view of the matter.

While Sarah's assertion that "the evidence say that if parents are involved in how their child is developing they do better" makes a parent sound like just one of many different kinds of professional involved in the child's life. It suggests that Sarah has spent more time in the past year talking to professionals than parents.

This impression is strengthened by the phrase that really caught my readers attention. Sarah referred to the  importance of ensuring that "young people [are]  really prepared to enter school".

Three- or four-year-olds called "young people"? There is something to be said for the old term "children" at such an age. Again, parents seem to have been downgraded here.

And these four-year-olds want to be careful. If they fail to meet the demands of their national curriculum they may become youths, at least in the Leicester Mercury.

Norman Lamb awarded medal by Royal College of Psychiatrists

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, has been awarded a President's Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists for his work championing mental health in parliament.Norman says:"'I am deeply honoured that Professor Bhugra and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have presented me with this reward. I have long campaigned for a better understanding of mental health and for improved access to care for those with mental health problems. 1 in 4 people will have a mental health problem at some time in their life, so it is an issue that affects every family.''

Speaking when the medals were introduced last year, Professor Dinesh Bhugra said:

"When I became president, one of my personal priorities was to extend the ways in which we celebrate and honour people from all walks of life who have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to improving the lives of people with mental illness."

Guido Fawkes told us the attack on Murdoch was "bound to fail"

We last saw Guido Fawkes leading journalists astray by dispatching them to a non-existent crisis meeting of Eastleigh Lib Dems. They wandered Hampshire for days like lost souls. I still get isolated reports of one turning up, bearded and skeletal, sleeping rough in a downland village.

So let us have a look at Guido's accuracy in other areas. Here he is, for instance, writing about the phone-hacking scandal in December of last year.

Under the headline They Huffed and Puffed, Coulson Still Standing Guido gave us the benefit of his inside knowledge:

With the news that the CPS won’t prosecute Andy Coulson, on the grounds of lack of admissable evidence, it looks like Coulson will stay in Downing Street as long as he wants, despite whatever the Guardian, New York Times, BBC and Labour will throw at him.

Coulson is as guilty as sin of condoning the News of the World culture, nevertheless it was pretty clear that unless documentary evidence was produced there would be no charges against Coulson. What has been a politically motivated attack by enemies of the Murdoch press was bound to fail without a smoking gun, however much they huffed and puffed.

Given that he was prepared to make an imlicit criticism of the News of the World culture, this makes Guido a better judge than David Cameron, Jenny Jones or Boris Johnson.

But in this case that is not saying much.

Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in 1959

Click on the picture to view the film on the British Pathe website.

Vince Cable's war on Rupert Murdoch

From the Daily Telegraph (21 December 2010)

Vince Cable has “declared war” on Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The Business Secretary indicated that he would seek to block Mr Murdoch from taking over BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster that he already partially owns.

The disclosure is the second revelation in extracts from a covertly recorded conversation between Mr Cable and two undercover reporters from this newspaper posing as Liberal Democrat supporters in his constituency.

“You may wonder what is happening with the Murdoch press”, Mr Cable said. “I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win”.

Does anyone think Vince was wrong?

Six of the Best 172

Liberal Democrat councillor Kathy Pollard celebrates the departure of Andrea Hill from Suffolk County Council: "In a county where half the population earn less than £17,500 a salary of £218k was always going to be unacceptable to the majority."

"His foreign policy was very much geared not to Empire, but to doing the right thing. Gladstone felt he had been put into this position by God, and so he had to pursue these policies even if they meant political failure, as it certainly did in terms of Ireland." Greg Garrett interviews Peter Francis, Warden of Gladstone's Library, on Patheos.

The Badger Trust says that an English badger cull would be a reckless gamble, reports Peter Black.

How to be a Retronaut has Scotland Yard's first surveillance photographs. Taken in 1912, they are of suffragettes. Our picture here shows Mary Raleigh Richardson.

"Conran recognized that the now servantless middle classes wanted elegant but low-maintenance housewares: cutlery that did not need endless polishing; tables that looked good without tablecloths; earthenware dishes that went straight from the oven to the dinner table; and new cooking utensils like the Wok which allowed meals to be prepared in minutes." Joe Moran mourns the demise of Habitat.

IanVisits heard Dan Cruickshank speak about how Spitalfields has changed since he moved to the area in 1977.

Boris Johnson called phone-hacking allegations "codswallop"

We have done David Cameron and Jenny Jones, so we may as well see Boris Johnson making a fool of himself over phone-hacking too.

Here he is as reported by Dave Hill for the Guardian last September:

Boris Johnson today dismissed continuing concerns over the News of the World's use of phone hacking as "codswallop" that "looks like a politically motivated put-up job by the Labour party".

Speaking at his monthly grilling by the London assembly, the mayor of London – who was warned by police in 2006 that he'd had his voicemail accessed, and was chair of the Metropolitan police authority (MPA) when the Guardian revealed last year that much larger numbers of people might have been by affected than had initially been known – insisted that he was "satisfied" by the Met's investigation of the matter.

Johann Hari and Jeffrey Archer

It seems small potatoes now, but when Harigate broke I mentioned that Johann Hari once worked as a researcher for Jeffrey Archer. I was not able to find a source for this fact on the net, which I remembered from an old Private Eye.

The new Eye helpfully reprints the item I remembered, which turned out to date from August 2007:

A litte known fact about the 28-year-old Indie pundit Johann Hari is that he used to work for Jeffrey Archer ... assisting the great fabulist with his novel Sons of Fortune.

Very unfairly, that item went on to add:

The boy-wonder clearly learned from the master.

Understanding Bipolar Disorder

The British Psychological Society (for whom I happen to work) is making its 2010 report Understanding Bipolar Disorder available for free download until 12 August. [Later. And for some time afterwards too.]

As one of the authors says:

“Much has been written about the biological aspects of bipolar disorders: this report aims to redress the balance by concentrating on the psychological aspects, both in terms of how we understand the problems and also approaches to help and treatment. 

We hope this report will influence the way in which services are delivered, so that more people have access to psychological treatments and that services will no longer insist that users accept one particular view of their problem.”

Green Mayoral candidate opposed phone-hacking investigation

It wasn't only David Cameron who got it wrong on phone hacking, as Helen Duffet points out on Liberal Democrat Voice.

Here is Jenny Jones, Green MLA and London Mayoral candiate, on the subject:

“Although this is not a victimless crime it is not something we should be spending a huge amount of time on,” she said.

“There are murders, child abductions and rapes that these officers could be investigating. All these people have to do is not use the voicemail facility on their phone and they will never be hacked again. At a time when resources are so stretched this investigation, for me, should be pretty low on the agenda.”

In Cameron's defence he was speaking in 2009 and had Andy Coulson to defend. Jones, incredibly, made those remarks in June of this year.

How David Cameron first reacted to the News of the World scandal

Liberal England first wrote about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in July 2009.

Read that post and you will find this passage:

The BBC quotes a spokeswoman for David Cameron as saying he is "very relaxed" about the story:

"The ramping up of this story is ridiculous" ... she said.

I hope Mr Cameron is not feeling so relaxed now.

Praise for Lynne Featherstone over Great Ormond Street

Andrew Gilligan, now the Daily Telegraph's London editor, wrote an article yesterday about Great Ormond Street Hospital's dishonourbale attempt to absolve itself of its share of the blame for the death of Peter Connelly (Baby P).

Writing of one of the doctors who has blown the whistle on the hospital, he concluded:

Kim Holt is very lucky to have as her MP the superb Lynne Featherstone, who has been fighting her constituent’s corner for the last three years. The hospital has been sabre-rattling against her as well, publishing on its website a, shall we say, unsatisfactory account of its dealings over the issue. Ms Featherstone has now published her response – and she, too, accuses Great Ormond Street of “concealing” and “misleading.”
This kind of behaviour is always a deeply telling sign of an institution in real trouble. Ms Featherstone has called on Ms Collins to resign, and says that if what is known now had been known at the time, she would have gone three years ago, along with Haringey’s Sharon Shoesmith. I agree.

The mud walls of Great Bowden

Wartime Housewife's household sale last Sunday was in Great Bowden, a rather horsey village which, unlike my home of Little Bowden, has managed to keep itself separate from Market Harborough. This is, in part, because Liberal and Liberal Democrat councillors have put a lot of work in opposing development of the fields between

I thought I knew Great Bowden well, but thanks to the district council's village trail leaflet I was able to make some new discoveries.

The best of them is this splendid mud wall, which lines the path from the churchyard to the village's Nether Green. The leaflet says:

Mud walls need "strong boots and a good hat"; that is a stone or cobble plinth and a coping of thatch or pantiles. The mud boundary wall to the churchyard and the adjacent footpath were rebuilt in the 1980s with clay pantiles, hand made at Barton Upon Humber.

My best friend from school lived near the far end of this footpath in the 1970s, but I can't remember ever using this path. There was then a mushroom farm at the end of the path; in fact, I even wonder if there was a right of way along here in those days.

Lovers of mud walls should also visit Little Bowden and Tur Langton.

The most extraordinary contribution to the debate on the News of the World scandal

Earlier today the Daily Telegraph published a blog post by its "chief leader writer" David Hughes.
Under the headline "What is the BBC really trying to do with its Milly Dowler coverage?" he writes:

While the allegations are – in David Cameron’s well-chosen words – “truly dreadful”, do they warrant this level of news overkill? Well, they do if there is a commercial interest at stake – and the one element of the story the BBC seems coy about is that it is itself a player in a particularly frenzied media battle.

This is bizarre.

It's not just the BBC that has led with this story: every television station and newspaper (even The Times) has done so. And this evening Channel 4 News broke new developments that have left the BBC trailing.

But far more important, the behaviour of the News of the World is a moral outrage. You don't need some underlying economic motive to be outraged by it. You just need to be a decent human being.

It is far more profitable to speculate on Hughes's own motivation.

Is he a free-market zealot who resents the BBC's very existence. Is he hoping for a job at News International having seen the writing on the wall at the Telegraph? Perhaps he made an ill-judged joke about one of the Barclay twins at its last Christmas party?

But one question, above all, presents itself: If Hughes is the paper's chief leader writer, what can the others be like?

South Sudan: Oxfam calls on UN Security Council to fund strong peacekeeping force

Inadequate numbers of peacekeepers for the next mission in South Sudan risk endangering thousands of lives and future stability, a news release from Oxfam argues:

As the Security Council this week debates the future of the mission, Oxfam warned that failure to fully fund and resource it – including by slashing troop or civilian staffing numbers due to cost concerns – would undermine the progress that has been made over the past six years.

“If there was ever a time for the Security Council and countries that contribute to peace keeping to support the people of Sudan, it is now. Violence is rising and this isn’t the time to go cheap by cutting on the budget of the future UN mission, on the number of boots on the ground or the number of civilian staff. They must walk the talk and provide their strong backing in a time of optimism but also extreme tension for the people of South Sudan,” said Kirsten Hagon, Head of Oxfam’s New York Office.

Read more of the background to South Sudan on the Oxfam blog. Should you feel moved to tweet on this, @WilliamJHague and @UKUN_NewYork are good accounts to copy it to.

Phil Knowles quoted in the United Arab Emirates' leading newspaper

Market Harborough Lib Dem councillor Phil Knowles has made it all the way to the Persian Gulf. He has been quoted by The National, which turns out to be the leading English-language newspaper in the UAE and claims to be "the leading English-language voice in the Middle East".

He is quoted in the course of a long article on the sorry affair of St Luke's Hospital, Market Harborough.

But why are they taking an interest in Harborough out in the Gulf?

Because, as The National helpfully explains:

A small construction firm in the Northern Emirates has become embroiled in a legal row in Britain over its failure to complete a hospital facility.

Modcon UK, a subsidiary of the Ras al Khaimah-based Modcon FZ, was hired to build a £2.3 million (Dh14m) day case unit at a hospital in Leicestershire ...

At the end of May, the trust gave Modcon UK 14 days to resume work. On June 7 it formally terminated the contract. It now plans to tender for another contractor to take over the project and hopes to have the new unit open by January.

A contract between the trust and Modcon UK was signed in January 2010, with the unit scheduled to be fully functional by August that year.

However, delivery of the 10 prefabricated units was delayed until January 2011, owing to last-minute changes to the design.

When the units arrived, they were found to have been damaged in transit and a dispute over liability ensued. The units were not finally moved from the port to the site until March.

Then in April, Leawood Builders, the local contractor hired to install and fit out the units, walked off site complaining it had not been paid by Modcon UK ...

At the end of May, the trust gave Modcon UK 14 days to resume work. On June 7 it formally terminated the contract. It now plans to tender for another contractor to take over the project and hopes to have the new unit open by January.

Phil Knowles makes his appearance at the end of the article:

The new unit is part of a £9.5m expansion to hospitals in Market Harborough. Philip Knowles, a local councillor, said there had been a campaign to improve the hospitals for 15 to 20 years.

"This is just the latest in a catalogue of disasters," he said. "This is of deep concern to everyone in Harborough. We've a real need to get this matter resolved, and resolved quickly."

You can sense people nodding in agreement all over the Persian Gulf and the south of Leicestershire.

Liz Rorison remembered

Laura Willoughby has written a nice tribute to Liz Rorison, who died a few days ago, for Liberal Democrat Voice.

Many will know her as the pianist at the Lib Dem Conference Glee Club, but there was far more to Liz than that. She was, for instance, Britain's first female radio outside broadcast sound engineer.

Banks and supermarkets: Two good issues for Liberal Democrats

Coalition or no coalition, I am all in favour of the Liberal Democrats challenging what the government is doing. It's just that I do not always think we choose the right issues.

The rebellion on the Health & Social Care Bill, for instance, seemed chiefly aimed at involving NHS professionals other than GPs in the proposed new structures. This was sensible as far as it went, but it was a long way from the sort of democratic reform of the NHS the party should be championing.

And the other week Politics Home reported that the Social Liberal Forum will be turning its attentions to education, with a demand that the governing bodies of free schools and academies should include community representatives.

I would support this, even if I do suspect that some of those behind the idea don't really want to see free schools and academies at all. I am liberal enough to believe that wider participation need not proved a brake upon innovation.

But I have deeper worries about these campaigns on health and education. They essentially involve defending the position of public-sector professionals, a group who are already well represented in our politics. I would like to see the Liberal Democrats showing more awareness of the interests of the wider public, which are not always the same as those of professionals.

And above all, there is something almost amusing about a party that has been out of power for around 90 years devoting its campaigning energies to what sometimes amounts to not much more than defending the status quo.

So what can Liberal Democrats campaign to change? Yesterday's Observer supplies two good issues.

The first is taking on the banks, and the Observer suggests that this is already underway:

Senior Liberal Democrats are demanding drastic action to break up UK banks into separate retail and investment divisions, as banking reform threatens to cause a new rift in the coalition.

In a letter to the Observer on the eve of the deadline for industry groups to respond to a government-commissioned report on reform, peers, MPs and senior figures in the national party insist that chancellor George Osborne's suggested approach falls short of what is needed.

The Lib Dems join a list of more than 50 politicians, academics and economists to demand that the party honours its commitments – most recently made at its spring conference – to achieve a full breakup.

The Lib Dem signatories of the letter are Adrian Sanders, Lord Trevor Smith, Linda Jack, Richard Grayson and Stephen Knight.

In the end this is a technical issue: if George Osborne's more limited reforms were likely to work, then there would be no reason not to accept them. But if there is any doubt, and there does appear to be considerable doubt, we cannot run the risk of having to bail out the banks again and must press for more substantial measures.

And, of course, being seen to take on the bankers would be good politics for the Liberal Democrats.

The second issue is the power of the supermarkets, again the subject of an article in yesterdays Observer. The article by Alex Renton reinforces the impression that today's supermarket barons have become the union barons of the 1970s. They have become over mighty and the government must take action to curb them.

Andrew George is one of the politicians who have taken up this issue, and it is one connects our concerns for the environment and local enterprise too. It is one we should campaign on more vigorously in future.

If the Liberal Democrats campaign to change the banks and supermarkets, and show a little less concern for opposing change elsewhere, then we will have earned the label that we too often use as a vague term of approval - "radical".

Cricket: A film from 1950

"The purpose of this film is not to teach cricket to the unbeliever - merely to give pleasure to the converted."

Narrated by Sir Ralph Richardson and John Arlott.

Peter Preston, Johann Hari and Harry Potter

Somehow Johann Hari the great journalist has passed me by. (Feel free to post links in the comments below if I have been missing a treat.) He has always seemed to me more of an academic essayist than a journalist. A good example are his slightly irritating appearances on The Review Show, where new film or novel has to be compared with three others to make sense of it.

So it was no great surprise to me that he should turn out to be more at home copying passages out of his interviewees' books than taking notes of what they say.

That said, I did not find his defence, with its implication that there is no middle position between that copying and including his subjects' every um, ah and repetition, at all convincing.

But it was a positive shock to find an experienced editor like Peter Preston repeating the same spurious argument in this morning's Observer:

the life of me, I can't work up a head of steam over Hari's occasional habit (in Indy interviews) of using a cleaned-up pre-written version of his subject's answers rather than a ... you know … more um! … rambling live response.

The explanation that Preston deploys this silly argument, as far as I can see from reading the whole column, is that Hari's delinquencies were exposed by bloggers, and Preston hates bloggers because they are not proper reporters. But, in an age where, more and more, people get their news from television or the net and rely on newspapers for comment, that distinction is very hard to maintain.

Preston also distrusts bloggers because they can be anonymous. And you have to concede that Preston has at least been consistent in his disapproval of anonymity.

In 1983 a civil servant called Sarah Tisdall (a cousin of my GP, I learnt recently) anonymously sent the Guardian documents detailing the plans for the deployment of American cruise missiles in Britain. She was later shopped to the government by the newspaper, whose editor was then one Peter Preston.

It happens that today's Observer contained another piece that explained what a real interviewer does.

In his profile of Rupert Grint - the Ron Weasley of the Harry Potter films - Tom Lamont writes:

With Grint you have to ask, and ask, and ask the same thing, to shake him from languor and from his reliance on dusty answers that have seen him through interviews for years.

That tells you a lot about modern Britain. Prize-winning political writers copy passages out of books, while probing interviewers devote their attentions to the stars of children's films.

The Liverbirds: Peanut Butter

Nothing to do with Carla Lane, thank God, this week's video is a sort of companion piece to The Monks. Both are sixties bands I discovered through Youtube and both were successes in Germany but not at home.

You might think that an all-girl Merseybeat band would get a small but honourable mention when pop history is written, but The Liverbirds seem to have been forgotten. A description of them that is all over the web - I have no idea where it orginates but Old Melodies is a good example - says:

They were startling to look at in an era when girl singers were supposed to be pretty on-stage, four tough-looking northern girls dressed in black and playing their instruments with attitude -- they cut a savage version of Bo Diddley's "Mona" and could rip through most any rock & roll standard, but when their record company had them throw on a soft Everly Brothers-type ballad or two, it sounded more like a joke; these girls couldn't harmonize to save their lives, but they rocked their asses off.

Listen to other track by them and you will find that is only a little unfair. But Peanut Butter rocks.

In which I meet Wartime Housewife

This afternoon I walked to Great Bowden and a household sale organised by Wartime Housewife, a fellow member of the Market Harborough school of blogging. She turns out to be just as sensible and pleasant in real life as on the screen, taking the power cut that had affected the village in her stride.

I came away with a homemade cake, a John Major novelty alarm clock and a copy of Uncle by the Revd J.P. Martin. What more could you ask for?

Also present was "The Father of My Children" who often features on the Wartime Housewife blog. He turned out to be Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England.

We talked about the School Prints from the Goldmark Gallery in Uppingham and I learned that it was he who fetched them back from Germany. They were still in the wrappings in which they had originally been shipped all those years ago.

As a philosopher once remarked, it is a small world.

Six of the Best 171

Disgruntled Radical asks how many people the police will exclude from this autumn's Liberal Democrat Confernce. A clue to the answer may be that the Greater Manchester Police barred 24 people from last year's Labour Conference.

"There can be no escaping that this result is a disastrous one. No amount of spin or massaging the statistics can escape the truth. Unlike in May, we can not even blame a further surge in the SNP vote for the spectacular collapse. The outcome is due as much, if not more, to our own weaknesses, failings and public perception of us than to the genius of other parties’ campaigning tactics." A Scottish Liberal feels so strongly about the result of the Inverclyde by-election that he has to use bold type.

Ask for expenses as an intern and you are unlikely to get the post, even when it is with " a prominent lesbian/bisexual lifestyle magazine". Her sins were scarlet, but her blog was Red reports an unhappy experience.

A video of Jonathan Meades excoriating Donald Trump can be found on Living on Words Alone.

The Age of Uncertainty tells us how it would set about saving Waterstone's.

"Could there be three-pound carp living in streams hidden underneath Manhattan buildings, or is this the fishy equivalent of the fantasy alligators that always lurk but never emerge from the sewers of New York?" Read National Public Radio and judge for yourself.

GUEST POST Why the Liberal Democrats should support co-operatives

Co-operation is an idea whose time has come round again, argues Peter Arnold from the Association of Liberal Democrat Co-operators.

The concept of co-operation in modern Britain includes the traditional co-operative movement founded in Rochdale in 1844 (now known as The Co-operative), but it also includes social enterprises, mutual organisations, credit unions, co-operative housing schemes, and community and voluntary organisations all over the country that operate along co-operative lines, and provide local goods and services to people in the areas where they live.

The idea behind co-operation is simple - people working co-operatively together can achieve far more than people working on their own. In short, teamwork always wins.

Britain needs creative, enterprising and innovative people with the ideas and the drive to change and improve things. But those individuals cannot realise their dreams on their own: they need other people to help them get their ideas to market. And those other people form the teams without which entrepreneurs cannot be successful; and the most effective teams are organised along co-operative lines.

Co-operatives appeal to Liberal Democrats because they are run along democratic lines – it’s one of the co-operative principles. Power-sharing, working together - all follow this cooperative principle. The Preamble to our Federal Party Constitution also states that the cooperative principle should be one of the key principles of the economic structure of the country. But how relevant is the co-operative principle in modern Britain? Can it be applied to every sphere of life, or is it best suited to the economic system?

The Association of Liberal Democrat Co-operators (ALDCo) is a Liberal Democrat pressure group whose aim is to promote discussion within the party on all aspects of co-operation. We believe the time is ripe for us to re-examine this concept, and we want to encourage debate on it within the party.

Our aim is to get the Party to adopt a policy motion committing us to the theory and practice of community development organised along co-operative lines in time for the 2015 general election.

This will, we believe, complete the policy re-alignment begun by the publication of the Theory and Practice of Community Politics in 1980, which was further developed by the publication of The Theory and Practice of Community Economics in 2008.

We believe that the Liberal Democrats will then have the most radical policy framework in place to transform Britain, based on what works, so that individuals and families can realise their human potential, and have the confidence to take control of their lives and communities, and to shape them as they choose.

But every journey begins with the first step, and there are some simple steps that all Lib Dems can take now to increase our involvement and visibility in the modern co-operative movement:

1. Join The Co-operative.
2. Use the wide range of services it provides, and share in the dividend based on how much you spend with the organisation.
3. Stand for election to The Co-operative’s regional and national committees and boards.
4. Join the Phone Co-op, which provides good quality and competitive phone and broadband services.
5. Seek out and help all those local groups in your area organised along co-operative lines.

The time for co-operatives has come again. Please join the debate on the ALDCo website.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

"Why are they remaking Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"? I grumbled, before checking and finding that the famous television adaptation with Alec Guinness was first screened in 1979. I was like someone in 1979 saying that a book that had previously been adapted in 1947 so there was no need to do it again.

So let me give an unqualified welcome to the new film of John Le Carre's book, the trailer for which you can find on the Guardian website. And the cast list is impressive - IMDB suggests Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Bendedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth - though they will do well to match the cast of the earlier television series.

It happens that I have been watching that series on DVD. It was made in an era when television was able or prepared to take much more time to tell a story than it is today. That version of Tinker, Tailor occupied six 45-minute episodes and benefited from that breathing space. Together with the complex structure with its flashbacks, it gave all the stars time to shine.

And, despite those flashbacks, it felt a very topical story in 1979 when the Cold War was still in full spate and the Berlin Wall seemed immortal. What filmmakers make of the story today will be interesting to see.

Rather than embedding the new trailer here, I am adding the closing titles from 1979. The Nunc Dimittis turns out to have been sung by Paul Phoenix - then a chorister at St Paul's and now a member of the King's Singers.