A tribute to Ian Jack

One of my favourite journalists died on Friday. Ian Jack was 77 and writing as well as ever up to the day he died.

The Guardian has an obituary of him and also an article in which six people pay tribute to him and choose their favourites among his articles.

My own is his piece from June 2021 on the decline of Rothesay, which left me with a strong desire to visit the resort:

Lack of demand ended the hotel’s cold-bath and wet-blanket therapies in the 1930s, but its superior atmosphere survived into the last decades of the last century, when Scottish trade unions still held their conferences in Rothesay's Winter Gardens and the leaders of the mineworkers, the boilermakers and the amalgamated engineers put up at the Glenburn and drank late whiskies in the bar. It was known - and still is by older Rothesay people - as "the Hydro". 

I saw it first as a child from the deck of a steamer, and by the time I reached 30 had enough confidence to sit on its veranda one late afternoon in June and ask for a Campari and soda. The bay stretched blue and unruffled towards the green hills. Only the rattle of a yacht’s anchor chain broke the quiet. I wondered - as many others have done - how such a lovely place could be so unvisited.

Market Harborough will lose its NatWest branch in January

NatWest Bank is to close its Market Harborough Branch in January, reports the Leicester Mercury.

The decision has been condemned by the president of the Market Harborough Chamber of Trade and Commerce. Kyra Williams told the Mercury:

"We've got a market here and not all of our traders actually use digital banking.

"So it does exclude a large cohort of especially small businesses. I think the Government needs to intervene, really, and force banks to provide a physical network of banks that people and small businesses can use.

"Because I think it is going to be a problem, unless we move to a cashless system there are always going to be people who do need physical banks."

It seems there's not much enthusiasm among small business for turbo-capitalism along the lines of the Truss/Kwarteng model.

On the same page, you can hear the views of the local Liberal Democrat councillor Barbara Johnson.

My mother banked with the NatWest and I was grateful it had a local branch where I could sort out things like the power of attorney in her last months. It will be harder to do things like that after the branch has closed.

And a word for that lovely little building, which must have been built for a small local bank in the 19th century.

Reunion: Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)

Before We Didn't Start the Fire, before It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), there was Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled me). Maybe REM were influenced by the brackets?

I saw this in an old chart on Twitter the other day. I don't suppose I've heard it since it was a hit in 1974, but I immediately remembered it and smiled.

Reunion were a group of session musicians who came together to record this track. The singer is Jeoy Levine, who had already enjoyed some success with bubble-gum and novelty records, notably Yummy Yummy Yummy by Ohio Express.

I've chosen a video with the lyrics for your greater enjoyment. They were written by Norman Delph, who was the Velvet Underground's first producer.

And because the song is from the Seventies, you get a guitar solo when the verbal invention briefly runs out.

Remembering Mike Basman and Audio Chess

One of the great figures of British chess, Mike Basman, has died.

Basman never qualified as a grandmaster, but when he drew with the former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik at the Hastings tournament of 1967, Botvinnik singled him out for praise among the younger English players.

And he was one of the strongest British players in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming increasingly famous for his choice of unconventional opening moves. Those who followed his example inevitably became known as 'Basmaniacs'.

Tony Miles, Britain's first grandmaster, once used one of Basman's openings to defeat the reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov, much to Karpov's annoyance,

Later in life, Basman made a great contribution as an organiser and inspirer of junior chess. Honouring him a couple of years ago, the world chess federation FIDE said:

With his books and personality, Michael Basman was an inspiration to several generations of British chess players. Grandmaster Raymond Keene once wrote, referring to Basman's promotion of youth chess, "Michael Basman is in many ways the most important person in British chess."

I met Mike Basman in London in the 1980s, but he was most important to me in the decade before when I was a teenager.

Under the name Audio Chess, he produced, sold and hired cassette tapes on chess. Most were on the openings, but I remember a useful one on Russian for chess players and, best of all, a tape that Tony Miles and Basman recorded.

Miles had just qualified as Britain's first grandmaster because of a strong performance in a tournament in the Soviet Union, and on the tape he demonstrated some of the key games. It sounds laughable in the digital age, but in the 1970s this tape seemed almost miraculously immediate.

I still remember from my increasingly distant chess career a game in which I beat one of Audio Chess's regular experts, the late Otto Hardy. I also won a rook ending for the county under the stern gaze of a spectating Otto, putting into practice things I had learned from one of his own tapes.

Mike Basman was born on in London in 1946. His father, an Armenian immigrant named Basmadjian, changed the family name to Basman. Michael temporarily changed his surname back when he lived in Yerevan for a period in his twenties. There he learned Armenian and even participated in the Armenian championship.

Chess in Britain is less colourful for his passing and, like most British players, of the last 50 years, I owe him a debt.

The Joy of Six 1085

David Hencke on the government's determination to rush ahead with introducing photographic voter ID in time for next May’s local elections - despite a warning that the timetable involved is "likely to introduce significant risk to safe election delivery".

The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which estimates levels of offending based on a sample of 13,500 households, suggests overall crime is falling, with a steep decline in theft. But crimes recorded by police are on the increase, with offences of violence rising sharply. Danny Shaw untangles the data.

Do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? Colin Davis concludes: "When we look at public support for the protesters’ demands, there isn’t any compelling evidence for nonviolent protest being counterproductive. People may 'shoot the messenger', but they do - at least, sometimes - hear the message."

Rachel Cunliffe says there’s something discomforting about the way North London has become the butt of Tory jokes about out-of-touch elites.

To mark the centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Literary Hub invites four writers and academics to discuss the importance, context, artistry, and legacy of the poem.

Graham Chapman on a new scheme to boost England's declining curlew population: "The first of this year’s birds to migrate away from Norfolk departed at sunset last Wednesday and arrived on a Staffordshire field at sunrise on Thursday. It then flew towards Ireland and made an anxiety-inducing trip out into the Atlantic before returning to dry land."

How theatre audiences reacted to Freda Jackson's performance in No Room at the Inn

Back to Freda Jackson, who played the villainous Mrs Voray in Joan Temple's play No Room at the Inn and also in the subsequent film. The play, like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, was inspired by the death of Dennis O'Neill.

I've come across a couple of accounts of how theatre audiences reacted to her performance.

Her son Julian Bird, who became an actor himself in his sixties after a career as a psychiatrist, spoke to the Guardian:

“I was brought up in a theatre family,” Bird says. His father, Henry Bird, was an artist who designed sets. His mother, Freda Jackson, was an actor, “a name in the 40s, 50s and 60s”. 

She was the lead in the play No Room at the Inn, about the abuse of evacuees during the second world war, which was so scandalous that she needed police protection when it transferred to the West End in 1946. “There were always women at the stage door wanting to kill her.”

And I recently found this comment on the IMDb page for the film:

I was Ronnie and my stage name was Stanley Conett (Stanley Heinemann) I played that part for 427 performances at the Winter Garden. Then toured England and Scotland with the show. 

Also I did the BBC version. It is a pity that you have published the wrong actor's name for the Winter Garden version of the show. I was too tall to be in the film version. 

The Theatre version often caused the audience to erupt with shouting and curses at Freda Jackson. The show ended with the girls suffocating Mrs Voray and it was different in the movie.

All of which goes to support the claim from the Nottingham Post that:

Such was the power of her performance, audiences are said to have stood and cheered when her character was finally vanquished.

GUEST POST Wealthy Rishi Sunak should give it all away

Rishi Sunak should take a leaf out of Mr Gladstone's book and give his fortune away, argues Eduardo Reyes.

Leaving aside our different locations on the political paint chart of this country, I can see that Rishi Sunak wants to be first known, and then remembered, as a good prime minister. 

To get to ‘good’ he faces some fierce headwinds. 

But I have an absolute zinger of an idea as to how he can remove a major threat to his aspiration. 

Sunak, having first discussed the matter with his wife, should say they are giving up pretty much all of their extraordinary wealth. 

It’s getting in his way. Their way.

Their asset protection, tax avoidance strategy – that non-dom status – possibly cost him his first shot at being PM. It was awkward, and that awkwardness overshadowed his pitch. 

Right now, his enemies (mostly, though not exclusively, within the post-logic Conservative party), opponents, the media, campaigners and folk with a benign curiosity are sniffing around his arrangements and his family’s affairs. 

Why run the risk? He’ll have seen the hit that his fellow parliamentarian Nadim Zahawi took when ex Clifford Chance tax lawyer Dan Niedle started to take an interest in the former’s tax affairs. And that line of inquiry is not even spent. 

Wealth is interesting. Why wouldn’t we look? 

Am I mad, you might be thinking? Perhaps unrealistic or naïve? Surely the world doesn’t work like that? As the song has it, the rich get rich, and the poor get poorer. 

In between time, in the mean time, ain’t we got… actually, a chat about politics and wealth. Because it really is all about political context. 

Let’s talk about William Ewart Gladstone, son of Sir John Gladstone. When slavery was abolished the compensation scheme listed dad-Sir-John as the single biggest recipient of payments to make up for his sad loss of enslaved labour. 

A Liberal hero of mine, and possibly yours, sits on such slave money. 

But perhaps the question was, or is, ‘What will/did he (Sunak/Gladstone) do with it?’ 

‘What will he do with it?’ was the question posed by Edward Bulwer Lytton, a 19th Century Liberal turned Conservative, in his novel of the same name. 

It is not quite off topic to note that in the novel, leading 14 sub-plots (there is no main plot), is the one where ‘he’ is a half blind peasant actor cared for by his angelic granddaughter, ‘it’ is £5, and what he does ‘with it’ is he buys a prize performing poodle, so the two of them can be self sufficient. 

In literary and political terms, it showed the poor really can stand on their own two feet with a bit of thought. (Though, spoiler alert, the dog isn’t there at the finish.)

Back in the room, as hypnotists say. 

W.E, Gladstone’s awkward wealth was for so long uninterrogated because of the liberal, and Liberal, bent his life took. Early parliamentary activity, the website ‘They Work For You’ would have shown if online in the 19th Century, had Tory-era Gladstone speaking up for enslaver interests. He changed, and his original position is mostly forgotten. 

And so back to Sunak. He had a period as a rich but beneficent chancellor of the exchequer. When he was the sponsor of the furlough scheme and Covid business continuity grants, we weren’t talking about the fact he might have a secret share in an ultra-high-net-worth pasta and toilet roll mine that only he and his mates could access. 

But things are different for him now. It might, or might not, be the right thing for him to cut certain taxes, or reduce regulation in certain sectors. But the suspicion of both self interest, and a lack of empathy with folk unimaginably worse off, clings to him like so many barnacles as he does it. 

So he should give up the wealth. 

Other ultra-rich people are talking about this. They range from folk who worry about their children becoming a pastiche of obnoxious trustafarian privilege, to others who look at the climate crisis, autocracy or modern slavery

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and wonder if their extraordinary wealth should go to change the things that worry them and elicit their sympathy. 

Why shouldn’t the Sunaks join them? 

There is a tendency in new-right circles to conflate ‘wealth’ with ‘wealth creation’. They are different. Inherited wealth, as some members of early 20th Century Liberal governments saw, is utterly different to wealth creation. The difference, for this prime minister, will be unpicked if he cleaves to the notion that these are the same. 

What, we and Sunak, should ask, is the purpose of wealth? 

It is a question worth asking – worth asking for the wealthy and for the rest of us. 

When it comes to private wealth, up to $68 trillion will transfer to another generation in the next 25 years. That dwarfs the wealth of many nations. It is spectroscopic in scale. The imagination of Scott Fitzgerald would have struggled to express it. It is far bigger than ‘a diamond the size of the Ritz’. 

What happens to it matters. If it all takes the route of asset protection, tax avoidance and vanity projects, that will be a problem. 

If Sunak’s wealth stops him doing well the PM job he wanted for so long, because details of its maintenance are exposed as, by turns, unideal or taxationally cirumnavational, he’ll kick himself. 

Why not, say, keep just two houses and, say £5m in the bank. Everything else is holding him back.  

If he doesn’t do this, every decision of his that cuts a tax or a benefit will be judged, scutinised, resisted and may be frustrated because of his own status as being absurdly wealthy. He won’t be able to argue for the much derided ‘Laffer curve’ without his intentions being doubted.  

He can’t take it with him – none of us can. But we hope to sense we leave a legacy of something – a skein above us that could be love, could be a reputation for good government, but is certainly something that a figure north of £730m, perhaps surprisingly (perhaps unsurprisingly), cannot buy. 

Bulwer Lytton, in his Liberal youth, thought the independent income a right-thinking gentleman got from the land gave him the ability to assess political and artistic questions with an objective head. 

But with a right leaning government, led by wealth, the money takes on a different colour. 

As for Sunak, on his largely unearned income: what, as Bulwer Lytton asked, will he do with it? What he should do, for his own sake, is give almost all of it away. 

Eduardo Reyes is a journalist and low-net-worth individual. He read history at Clare College Cambridge, and is a member of the sneering, metropolitan liberal elite. He lives in South London. You can follow him on Twitter.

Why is the constituency called Shrewsbury and Atcham?

I have solved one of the mysteries of Shropshire politics: why is the constituency called "Shrewsbury and Atcham" when Atcham is only a small village?

The solution is that the constituency does not cover just the town of Shrewsbury, but also takes in a swathe of countryside to its south that stretches from the Severn to the Welsh Border. This includes the Stiperstones and the nearby large villages of Minsterley and Pontesbury.

And until 1974 the local authority covering that countryside was Atcham Rural District Council.

Atcham RDC was merged with the Borough of Shrewsbury in 1974. The new authority was expected to be named merely Shrewsbury, but when councillors met they decided to call it the Borough of Shrewsbury and Atcham. 

The parliamentary constituency adopted the name Shrewsbury and Atcham in time for the 1983 general election, even though it kept the boundaries of the old Shrewsbury seat.

The Borough of Shrewsbury and Atcham disappeared in 2009 when Shropshire became a unitary authority. And under the 2016 Boundary Commission proposals, the constituency, while remaining largely unchanged, will revert to the name of Shrewsbury.

When that happens, the benign ghost of Atcham Rural District Council will have been laid to rest.

Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will haunt the Tories for years to come

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If Rishi Sunak was meant to offer a fresh start, then his first cabinet was deeply disappointing. There was little sign of a cabinet of all the talents, made possible by the soothing of old enmities, beyond the return of Michael Gove.

In fact it's hard not to be depressed at many of the names he brought back or kept on yesterday: Gavin Williamson, Suella Braverman, Dominic Raab, Thérèse Coffey.

If you try to come up with a list of four more encouraging names, you are likely to come up with something like: David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart.

Trouble is, none of that four is still in the Commons. All were among the 21 Conservative MPs who lost the whip in September 2019 for, in effect, voting against a no-deal Brexit.

Gauke  and Grieve stood as Independents in the general election later that year, while the other two did not defend their seats under any label.

It's clear that Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will continue to hurt his party for years to come, and not just because it cannot spare people of that talent.

If the Conservative Party is to have a future that does not involve a permanent shift to being the English Nationalist Party, then at some point the moderates are going to have to fight back.

And if they are going to do so, those moderates and the party as a whole will need a leader - a Tory version of Neil Kinnock, if you will.

It's possible to imagine that such a figure can be found among the four names I chose. It's much harder to imagine he or she is to be found in Sunak's new cabinet.

Hans Niemann sues Magnus Carlsen and others for $100m over chess cheating allegations

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The teenage American chess player Hans Niemann has filed a lawsuit seeking $100m in damages from the world champion Magnus Carlsen and others who have more or less explicitly accused him of cheating.

He has accused them of colluding to blacklist him from the strongest tournaments.

If you are interested in his chances of success, listen to the latest edition of Perpetual Chess Podcast, where a law professor gives his views. He feels that Niemann may face an uphill struggle to prove his case.

In the mean time, Niemann has answered his critics with a strong performance in the US Championship.

As Leonard Barden wrote in the Guardian:

St Louis’s expensive state-of-the art security precautions, with metal-detecting wands, radio-frequency scanners, and scanners for checking silicon devices, were probably the most thorough for any chess tournament in history. They did the trick, and there have been no serious suggestions that any game was played abnormally.

The outcome is that Niemann, competing without outside assistance as a US championship debutant, and playing under extreme pressure from all the many allegations before and during the tournament, has still performed at the level of the world’s top 40 grandmasters, and has maintained his elite 2700 rating.

St Crispin's Day and why John Arlott was the greatest commentator

Today, 25 October, is the feast day of the twin saints St Crispin and St Crispinian. Jacob Rees-Mogg couldn't resist dating his resignation letter "St Crispin's Day" - Crispin's twin never gets the same coverage.

The two were martyred in 285 or 286 in Northern France, and a local tradition holds that they lived for a time at Faversham in Kent.

St Crispin's Day (his twin doesn't get the same coverage) is famous as the date of the Battle of Agincourt and for the king's speech in Shakespeare's Henry V.

My favourite piece of cricket commentary dates from March 1977 and the Centenary Test - a one-off test played between England and Australia at Melbourne to mark the centenary of test cricket and of Ashes cricket in particular.

Arriving from a victorious tour of India, the England captain Tony Greig won the toss and put Australia in. A good team bowling performance saw them dismissed for 138. Sadly, normal service was resumed as Dennis Lillee and Max Walker bowled England out for 95.

Australia declared their second innings at 419 for 9, setting England an improbable 463 to win. Yet for a while it looked as though they might get there. Good batting by Mike Brearley, Derek Randall and Dennis Amiss meant England reached 279-2.

But it was not to be. Dennis Lillee too five wickets and Australia won by 45 runs, which had been there margin of victory a hundred years before.

While things were going well in England's second innings and Derek Randall was batting out of his skin, I heard, listening in the night, John Arlott say:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

He really was the greatest cricket commentator of all.

Jacob Rees-Mogg will not be in the new cabinet, but he was in the first series of 24

It sounds as though Jacob Rees-Mogg will not feature in Rishi Sunak's first cabinet, which suggests our new prime minister has better judgement than his two predecessors.

As a consolation to his admirers - I know, but say something disobliging about him on Twitter and you will meet them - here is an unexpected glimpse of him in the first series of 24.

If you can't spot him first time, have a look at the television screen at 0.15.

The Joy of Six 1084

"The thought occurs that maybe the Conservative Party no longer cares.  Perhaps the sum of its ambition is to become the provisional wing of the right-wing entertainment industry: happy to preach to a diminishing band of true believers, and good for a newspaper column or fringe TV turn, while Keir Starmer gets on with the tiresome business of actually running the country." Paul Goodman ponders the continuing appeal of Boris Johnson to Conservative members.

Patrick Barkham meets Guy Shrubsole, who is campaigning to double the one per cent of Britain's land area where rainforests endure: "There’s something so alluring about this weird, gnarled, dripping, moss-encrusted ecosystem. The fact that it sounds exotic but thrives very specifically on British weather is really magical. I wanted to re-enchant more people with the magic of the rainforest we have left in this country."

"Early on, the journal Nature rejected him because, as they told Lovelock: 'We don’t publish papers from home addresses. They mostly come from cranks.'" Roger Highfield profiles the late James Lovelock and asks if his death in July on his 103rd birthday marked the end of the golden age of the independent expert.

Neil Mackay meets the archaeologist Professor Tony Pollard, whose work has uncovered astonishing truths about Culloden, the Battle of Waterloo and even the Falklands campaign, and has helped bring peace to traumatised soldiers.

"Witchcraft is in the bones of Shropshire folk, if we are to believe Folklorist Charlotte Burne. She wrote that magic was so intertwined in the lives of people here, that when a new vicar took parish near Clee Hill, he was shocked to discover how prominent of a role it played in everyday life." Nearly Knowledgeable confirms my view of life in the Shropshire hills.

Samantha Yeo remembers living with a ghost who played her old music box and hid under her bed.

Write a guest post for Liberal England

I welcome guest posts on Liberal England. Not only that: I'm happy to publish posts on subjects far beyond the Liberal Democrats and British politics.

If you'd like to write something for this blog, please send me an email so we can discuss your idea. 

I'm happy to entertain a wide variety of views, but I'd hate you to spend your time writing something I really wouldn't want to publish.

Here are the 10 most recent guest posts on Liberal England:

• Carry On up the Brexit - Stuart Whomsley
• Why the Progressive Alliance is irrelevant in Batley and Spen - Matthew Pennell
• Is a Yellow Wall emerging? - Matthew Pennell
• We need a new generation of Liberal Clubs - Matthew Pennell
• Saving Church Langton's open space from the Diocese of Leicester - Anthony Lawton
• The Bielsa dream is over - Stuart Whomsley
• Can trade unions make a big comeback? - Stuart Whomsley
• The essays and reviews of Angela Carter - Cathy Kirby
• Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Were Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood very naughty boys? - David Grace
• A newspaper for and by Leicester people - Reece Stafferton

A review of See How They Run

It's going to be hard to write this post without spoilers for See How They Run and even The Mousetrap, but I'll make sure I give warning of any that occur. 

It's fair, though, to say that the identity of the murderer in The Mousetrap is only a secret if you want it to be: you have only to read the play’s Wikipedia entry to discover it. There are at least two full performances of the play on YouTube and you can find the complete script online too. You can even hear Tom Holland blurting out the killer's identity in a recent, and otherwise excellent, The Rest is History podcast on Agatha Christie.

Anyway, I went to see the film See How They Run a couple of weeks ago. It concerns a murder behind the scenes of Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap in the early 1950s and mixes real and fictional characters. It pays homage to and parodies the murder mysteries of the golden age, and has ambitions to do more that I’m not convinced it fulfils. It made me laugh, but it also worried me.

Some of the reviews were too enthusiastic, particularly those that praised the "chemistry" between Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan. Because in this film Rockwell is the most inert substance ever discovered: he barely reacts to Ronan for most of the film.

But then there is not much reaction between any of the characters at all, which is in part a function of the usual pattern of detective fiction, where the suspects are questioned in turn and in private by the detective.

The best performance is Ronan’s as WPC Stalker, but as Tina Kakadelis says:

Ronan’s comedic timing is impeccable, but instead of leaning into that, the film tends to make Stalker’s optimism the butt of the joke. It’s a decision that feels lazy in terms of cultivating comedy.

Elsewhere in the cast, we are told that Reece Shearsmith’s John Woolf is an interesting character, but less often shown it, while Harris Dickinson and Pearl Chanda could win a contest for being the pair of actors as little like Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim as possible.

And here come the spoilers…

Just as in The Mousetrap, the catalyst of the murder (in fact murders, as we’re doing spoilers) in See How They Run is someone seeking revenge for the death through cruel treatment of a child. As readers will be aware by now, Agatha Christie was led to this idea by the death of the foster child Dennis O’Neill at a farm in Shropshire in 1945.

Christie changed things around a little, making the younger rather the elder brother the victim and adding a sister to expand the number of possible suspects. When the murderer is revealed, they are treated with kindness.

Not so in See How They Run. Over to Gregory Mysogland:

The party is … locked inside and held at gunpoint by Dennis (Charlie Cooper), an usher from the theatre the play is being performed at. Dennis’ full name is revealed to be Dennis Corrigan, one of two brothers’ whose tragic story of childhood abuse served as the inspiration for The Mousetrap. In reality, the boys’ last name was O’Neill and the one named Dennis is the one who died young, while his brother Terence survived. 

See How They Run's Dennis has always been outraged by the success of The Mousetrap, which he feels exploits his brother's death. He killed Leo and Mervyn to stop the film adaptation from going forward and hopes that killing Christie and the house guests will get the play shut down.

The reveal of Dennis as the killer makes sense given the film's meta-commentary but the legitimate question it raises isn't given the consideration it deserves. The film puts some effort into criticizing how the entertainment industry exploits real tragedies, but not nearly enough. …

At Christie's, the group pretends to understand Dennis’ frustration and tries to console him, but they only do so to save themselves from him. Christie expresses sympathy for him but states that to not write about tragic topics would be to deny a part of who she is. This is an understandable viewpoint, but it's also the last word the film says on the issue, and as such is much too simplistic and one-sided. ...

Eventually, Christie herself kills Dennis by hitting him in the head with a shovel, comically going in for more blows before the others stop her. Although Henderson's manic performance is good enough to make this scene darkly funny on first viewing, upon reflection, it adds to the exploitation of the O'Neill's represented by Dennis' role. 

Making the character a murderous villain and then dismissing his legitimate argument with a wave of the hand is bad enough, but having him meet a violent death similar to the real Dennis's is cruel and immoral, not to mention completely against the ideas the film tries to bring up in relation to him.

Nothing further, m'lud.

I suppose the defence might point out that there is something inherently funny about a butler being killed in a whodunnit, and that any dig at Julian Fellowes is to be applauded.

Sandy Denny and Johnny Silvo: The 3.10 to Yuma

3.10 to Yuma is a 1957 Western starring Van Hefflin, who had also appeared in Shane as Joe Starrett. This, its theme song, was recorded by Sandy Denny and Johnny Silvo for their 1967 album Sandy & Johnny, though I think this is not the take that appears on the record.

Sandy Denny has appeared on this blog several times, so let's talk about Johnny Silvo. He died in 2012 at the age of 75, and his Independent obituary is worth a read:

Johnny Silvo was the sort of populist folk singer for whom Britain's folk scene coined the expression "folk entertainer". He was an old-school folkie whose repertoire of folk and folk-blues standards, jazz and blues material chimed with the country's folk scene in the 1960s and 1970s in particular. 

His name seldom figures in accounts of the subject, except maybe as a marginal note associated with Sandy Denny ... through her time singing with the Johnny Silvo Folk Four and their joint album Sandy & Johnny (1967). Silvo's audience, concentrated in Western Europe and Scandinavia, did not care and stayed true to the end.

Born John Woods in Wimbledon, like the notable guitarist, composer and vocalist Davey Graham he was mixed-race. Supposedly, his mother was from Ireland and his father was an African-American serviceman. The story goes that his mother was killed in an air raid, so he grew up as a Barnardo's Boy. 

The historical record shows that it was hard enough being placed with a family after the war if white; getting adopted as a mixed-race child in post-war Britain was harder still. He lived in a succession of Barnardo's homes in Surrey and Hertfordshire.

Silvo also appeared on television as a presenter of Play School.

Telling at the Robert Monk Hall, Foxton

The is Foxton village hall, which opened in 1931 and is in a vaguely Tudor style. It was a gift from Robert Monk, who came from the village and made his money running the Robin Hood Hotel on Gallowtree Gate in Leicester.

I was there today and thought of 1986, when the Liberals won three Harborough District Council by-elections in a row. I gained Market Harborough North, Simon Galton gained Thurnby, and Colin Wells gained Foxton, Lubenham and Gumley.

The third of those by-elections took place on 9 October. I can date it because I remember it was the week the Independent launched and I read one of the newspaper's very first issues while telling at the Robert Monk Hall, which was the polling station for Foxton.

It's less a memory than a flashback: there were two Conservative tellers and they spent their time discussing a horse that had suffered a nosebleed. Foxton seemed that sort of village.

Foreign affairs reporting at its finest

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A letter in Private Eye complains that Lord Gnome's organ began a report on restrictions imposed by the Iranian government with the words:

The Iraqi government imposed widespread internet blackouts to try to contain the unrest that followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini...

This reminds me of the story about the subeditor working a freelance shift on a newspaper who called out: "What's your house style? 'Iran' or 'Iraq'?"

A church on the edge: St Mary's, Happisburgh

I visited Happisburgh once. I wanted to see the eroding cliffs and liked the unexpected way its name was pronounced.

Simon Knott shows you the cliffs, pronounces the village's name correctly and shows you Happisburgh's fine church.

One story he does not tell is the one about Arthur Conan Doyle staying at the inn in the village and being inspired by the landlord's young son and his interest in codes to write the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

In 2006 Norman Lamb unveiled a plaque commemorating Conan Doyle's visit.

The Evening Standard says naturists have hailed the first bison born wild in the UK for thousands of years

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We don't have a Standfirst of the Day Award, but if we did the Evening Standard would have walked away with it for its:

The first wild bison has been born in the UK for thousands of years in what has been hailed as a "monumental moment" by naturists.

And here's a screenshot, just in case the Standard corrects it.

But I doubt it will - it's already made fun of its mistake in a "what are we like?" tweet.

I've read enough old stories via the British Newspaper Archive to realise there was never a golden age of error-free papers, but come on guys. Find some subeditors and raise your game.