Jago Hazzard takes us to Camden Town station and its curse: the most complicated junction on the London Underground.
Blame the witch Mother Damnable or Mother Redcap. The station was almost named after a pub that bore her name.
You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.
The photograph above is captioned on Getty Images:
British Liberal Party politician John Pardoe with his wife Joyce, UK, 24th September 1964. Pardoe is standing against Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher as the Liberal candidate for Finchley.
And Pardoe did very well at Finchley in the 1964 general election, putting the Liberals into second place and recording a seven per cent swing against the sitting Conservative MP Margaret Thatcher.
A Jewish Chronicle article by Robert Philpot from 2017 gives an important reason for this achievement:
When Mrs Thatcher was selected as Finchley's Conservative candidate in July 1958, she inherited a seemingly impregnable majority of nearly 13,000. She soon discovered, however, that the Tories had a little local difficulty on their hands. At its centre were the constituency's Jewish voters who constituted a politically significant one-in-five of the electorate.
It stemmed from that most quintessentially middle-class of pursuits: golf. The previous year, a number of Jews – including Shirley Porter, then a young Liberal activist – had applied to join the Finchley golf club. Each had had their membership refused; not an uncommon occurrence at golf clubs at this time.
The club leased its land from the Tory-dominated borough council, and its officers included a number of prominent local Conservatives. Scenting an opportunity, two Jewish Liberals fought and won seats in Finchley’s wealthiest and most Jewish wards.
Upon her selection, a horrified Mrs Thatcher discovered that, while the club had swiftly caved in and agreed to admit Jewish members, more lasting damage had been done: in the next year's local elections, the Liberals made further advances. "The Jewish faith," she worriedly wrote to Central Office, "have allied themselves to Liberalism."
The golf-club scandal had come to symbolise a cloud of antisemitism which hung over the local Tory association. That was not altogether surprising given the attitude of Sir John Crowder, the retiring MP, who privately grumbled that the national party was trying to impose a choice between "a bloody Jew and a bloody woman" as his successor.
Mrs Thatcher was, she later recalled, upset that her new local association had been "tainted" by antisemitism and moved swiftly to repair the damage. She prioritised the recruitment of new Jewish members and invited Sir Keith Joseph, the Tories' rising Jewish star, to speak locally. Her efforts appeared to bear fruit: in October 1959, she increased the Tories' majority to over 16,000.
However, the Liberal bandwagon continued to roll. In 1962, the party made sweeping gains and a year later it seized control of Finchley town hall. Six of its 19 councillors were Jewish, including the new leader of the council and mayor. Drawing a parallel with the Liberals' recent dramatic by-election victory, the press dubbed Finchley "the Orpington of North London."
Mrs Thatcher knew exactly the source of her problems. "It’s the golf club… that’s where it all started," she told one journalist. Her finely tuned political antenna were correct: she held Finchley in 1964, albeit with a sharply reduced majority. However, Jews in the seat voted Liberal in considerably higher proportions than non-Jews, with Mrs Thatcher and the Liberal candidate, John Pardoe, each taking roughly 40 percent of the Jewish vote.
John Pardoe went on to become MP for North Cornwall in 1966 and represented the seat until he was defeated in 1979. In the Seventies he became the party's economic spokesperson and, along with David Penhaligon, one of my early Liberal heroes.
Shirley Porter, who died earlier this year, followed a different political career path.
BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this tale from Chester.
I am reminded of the glory days of Lord Bonkers' safari park at the Hall.
From an article on the BBC website by Thomas Hobbs:
Centring on an edgy, city-dwelling female protagonist unapologetically owning her sexuality, the brilliant song Roving Woman sounds like the work of a millennial musician. Evoking the smoky, airborne notes of a late-night Brooklyn bar, it contains lilting guitar harmonies that float in and out of focus like cascading cigarette smoke, while its melancholy vocal is reminiscent of popular contemporary folk musicians like Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen. "Someone always takes me home!" the lead singer swoons.
Yet the truly remarkable thing about this track is it was actually recorded more than 70 years ago. Roving Woman isn't the work of some lo-fi singer-songwriter in their early 20s, but is in fact the forward-thinking creation of Connie Converse. She was a bedroom musician who wrote the bulk of her songs in early 1950s New York, years before Bob Dylan came on the scene and sparked a new singer-songwriter movement.
But she pulled back from her musical dreams at the turn of the 1960s and then, in 1974, aged 50, disappeared completely – never to be heard from again. It was only this century that this mysterious artist's work was rediscovered and has found a devoted audience, stunned by just how pioneering she was.
And:
Another one of Converse's fans is Martin Carr, the English folk musician and lead singer of the band The Boo Radleys, who has written several songs paying tribute to her. "Connie had a dramatist's eye – the ability to conjure a fully inhabited world from a single detail," he explains. "The fact that she named a song after a J.M. Synge play, or was capable of lyrics such as 'Spring seemed to linger in a little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand', tells you she was reaching well beyond the American folk tradition."
Carr is also particularly impressed by Converse's guitar playing and believes it's extraordinary no matter what generation you come from. "Her guitar playing is phenomenal. I can't play her songs, they're too hard for me!" Carr enthuses. "Her playing reminds me of the way Paul Simon plays; orchestral arrangements for six strings. She was a true individual, an artist of no time."
"The Liberal Democrats have always stood for the idea of liberty and freedom from poverty, from homelessness, from what Beveridge called the evils of society. And why would we stop at the ballot box? Clearly it makes sense that if we want to try and enrich people’s lives, and help them find meaning, why aren’t we supporting co-operatives more and being more vocal about them?"
Here's what we need: a website devoted to the BBC productions of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.
Guinness is Smiley explains:
The aim of this website is to publish fresh material about both series, identify some of the filming locations and signpost visitors to the wonderful content that is already out there. This website is not a commercial endeavour and will hopefully be of interest to fans of both productions.
I have my dad to thank for my love of these series. He watched each episode beside me when they were first broadcast, but I understood only a little of what I saw back then. As an adult I have seen them many times and find them endlessly compelling and fascinating. The intricacies of the plot and the quality of the acting keep me coming back time after time.
Lord Bonkers had a similar reaction:
Yes, I miss Paddy Ashdown. I miss his correspondence – those envelopes marked "Top Secret: Burn Before Reading" that arrived by every post – and I miss his company. Despite Ashdown's best efforts, I never could quite get my head around Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. "What exactly was Toby Esterhase up to?" I would ask him, and "So did old Smiley do right by Ricki Tarr in the end?"
Now Paddy is gone there is no one in the party to explain this to me. I tried asking Ming Campbell the other day, but he just told me Sir Percy Alleline was a fine upstanding fellow and that he wouldn’t listen to a word against him.
Abandoning the triple lock on pensions is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.
Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.
"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.
"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today.
Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."
Our Headline of the Day Award goes to the Leicester Mercury.
I know things can get pretty het up on the city council, but the authority in question here is Witherley Parish Council.
The village of Witherley lies on the Leicestershire-Warwickshire border near Atherstone, and we are able to bring you exclusive video of its most recent attempt to conduct a parish council meeting.
Farmers have been complaining for some time that the price of farmland has lost any connection with the income that be derived from farming it. And The Agri Brigade column in the new Private Eye suggests they have a strong case:
Average UK farmland prices have more than quadrupled this century, from just under £2,000 an acre to well over £8,000 an acre, according to statistics from land agents Savills.
Over that time, farm profitability has remained poor, but farmland's IHT-free status drew many ultra-high-net-worth individuals into buying land as a convenient way of minimising their tax liabilities – the so-called "Jeremy Clarkson effect".
By doing so, these buyers pushed up the price of farmland way beyond what many ordinary farmers can afford to pay for it (UK farmland prices are four times higher than those in France, for example).
For this reason, I argued back in January that it was the lack of inheritance tax on farmland that had caused causing farmers' problems.
But now, from the same Eye column, comes good news:
Evidence is emerging that the controversial withdrawal of 100 per cent Inheritance tax [IHT] relief on farmland is having the intended effects of cooling a previously overheated market and deterring those who are more interested in minimising their tax bill than producing food. ...
In 2025, the proportion of farmland bought by what Strutt & Parker describes as "lifestyle buyers" fell to 11 per cent down from 16 per cent the year before. At the same time, the proportion of farms bought by farmers rose to a seven-year high of 59 per cent.
During 2025, the Knight Frank Farmland Index showed that bare agricultural land sold in England and Wales fell by an average of 5 per cent, the first time since 2017 that prices had fallen this much over a 12 month period.
The Eye speculates that, because they tend to represent the interests of their wealthier members, the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association (formerly the Country Landowners Association) will continue to campaign against inheritance tax on farmland.
But I hope we Liberal Democrats will quietly drop our campaign against what, strangely, we called the "Family Farm Tax".
It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd, but I need scarcely observe that I kept this to myself. – Bleak House, Charles Dickens.
Mrs Jellyby goes in for what Dickens call "telescopic philanthropy", in that she devotes her energies to promoting a philanthropic project in far-off Borrioboola-Gha while her own children fall into the grate. We've all known political households like that.
You can also have telescopic radicalism. In the distant era when David Alton was a Liberal, then a Liberal Democrat, and a Liverpool MP, one commentator pointed out that he was idealistic about issues that were a long way away, but hard-headed when they were close to home.
It seems we now have a telescopic radical for a prime minister.
Yesterday, Andy Burnham wrote a courageous article for the Guardian, explaining the sanctions his government is rightly imposing upon Israel for its illegal actions in the occupied territories.
But, back in Britain, masked, uniformed fascists are roaming the streets and closing down ports without a word from our new prime minister.
If you want to see the danger of introducing the profit motive into the detention of young offenders, watch this video on Pennsylvania's Kids for Cash Scandal.
In the first decade of this century, two judges in Luzerne County, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella, accepted millions of dollars in bribes to lock up children and teenagers for trivial offences from the owners of for-profit detention centres. At least 2,300 young people were wrongly imprisoned.
And get a load of cuddly Uncle Joe Biden at the start of the video.
"Our findings lay bare the reality of an industry that operates without regulation. Some companies are run by people with no previous experience in care work: directors are security bosses, or come from the music business or the military. One company in our dataset is owned by an overseas private equity firm." Tom Wall reveals the vast scale of England’s £255m illegal care industry.
"Eight in ten of the UK public think mobile phone thefts have increased since 2010 and around six in ten believe both vehicle-related thefts and burglary have increased. In fact, all are down by 50 per cent or more over that time period." Bobby Duffy says that, though crime is falling, the public doesn't feel safer.
Nik Popli takes us inside the attempt to remake the Democratic Party in the US.
"Everyone who knows Muir’s work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined, by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political nightmares." Andrew Frisardi mourns the eclipse of Edwin Muir's poetry.
Mari Wilson on how she made Just What I Always Wanted.
Bob Dylan glammed up sounds good. This is on Ferry's 1973 debut album These Foolish Things, and it reached no. 10 in the singles chart the same year.
Geoff Marshall says in his YouTube blurb:
So we quite often talk about Least Used Stations ... but what about the Least SERVED - the stations the get the fewest services with just a small number of trains per week?
Since it's been 10 years since I rode Stockport/Stalybridge with Karl, we headed out to Lincolnshire to ride the line to Skegness to tick off three Least Served stations, and find out what the least served stations in the country are.
I'm so old that I can remember when Stockport to Stalybridge had a proper service and was a useful route. And when I rode the line to Skegness, it was on a Jolly Fisherman excursion train behind a pair of Class 20s.
A woman has said she warned police about the masked mass protest in Dover days before it happened, despite officers calling it 'spontaneous'.
Kent Police has been criticised for its 'slow response' after hundreds of masked protestors in balaclavas wearing all-black halted traffic at the port on Saturday.
The force defended their handling of the 'spontaneous protest', but Metro has spoken to an anti-racism campaigner who said officers should have been more prepared.
In a statement to Metro, Kent Police admit getting a tip-off late on Friday evening that a protest could take place in the town the following day – but that intelligence was not fully assessed.
Maz Garside, from Portsmouth, claims she told Counter Terror Police about action planned in Dover involving men in balaclavas, led by Tommy Robinson's 'right-hand man' Daniel Thomas, on the Tuesday before the protests.
And Hope Not Hate has posted an account of demonstrators massing in a Kent village the evening before the protest and talking freely about their plans in the pub.
Matthew Scott, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent has issued this statement:
Kent Police has acknowledged that an opportunity was missed that could have enabled the Force to mobilise sooner and bring the disruption to an end more quickly. Matthew Scott, Kent’s Police and Crime Commissioner, said:
"I welcome an independent learning review by the College of Policing. I have asked that this examines how information is triaged by the Force and the communications strategy the Force deployed in response to the event. I look forward to receiving the findings of that review. I will ensure that Chief Constable is held to account for any findings and recommendations that it makes.
"It is essential that we understand how this happened, and that lessons are leant.
"This is separate to the response of Officers, Staff and Specials on the ground, who did the best they could, in the circumstances they were presented with, to bring the disruption to an end as soon as they did."
The Derby Telegraph wins our Headline of the Day Award.
On one occasion, the fellow officer who stopped him is reported to have said:
"Who do we think we are, sir? The police and crime commissioner for Nottinghamshire?"
The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance took place today. I can't find a video of the proceedings, so here's a short one from 2016.
Wikipedia explains:
The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is a folk dance which takes place each September in the village of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, England.
It is performed by ten dancers, accompanied by a musician playing an accordion and a youth with a triangle. Six of the dancers carry reindeer horns; the remaining four take the roles of a hobby horse, Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow.
On Wakes Monday the performers dance around the parish all day, beginning early in the morning at the parish church where the horns are stored.
That entry also has plenty on the dance's history and possible significance.
Edward Woodward adds: Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!
