The glorious story of Shacklewell and De Beauvoir Town

Another walk with John Rogers:

This East London walk takes is into the surprising hidden corners of the London Borough of Hackney. Our urban stroll explores the historic areas of Shacklewell and De Beauvoir Town, both with rich and fascinating histories. Starting on Mare Street we follow Amhurst Road to Shacklewell Lane and the site of Shacklewell House which had been an important country house from at least the 16th century. 

We then take a look at the Somerford Grove Estate designed by Frederick Gibberd in the late 1940s and winner of a prize at the Festival of Britain of 1951. Crossing Kingsland Road we then wander the streets of one of London's most beguiling hidden neighbourhoods, De Beauvoir Town. Developed in the 1830s this Victorian area was saved from demolition in the 1960s and remains one of London's true hidden gems.

It didn't make this YouTube blurb, but towards the end we also see the home of the Hackney Mole Man, who was made famous by Iain Sinclair.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and he blogs at The Lost Byway.

Sir Walter Scott invented "The Wars of the Roses"

Here's an interesting passage from Chris Given-Wilson in a recent London Review of Books:

There are several earlier references, dating back at least to the early 14th century, to red and white roses being used occasionally as insignia by the families later associated with the Lancastrian and Yorkist causes, but it was not until Shakespeare picked up on the idea in Henry VI Part I... that it entered the popular imagination. ...

It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them twice) and fifteen internecine ‘battles’ – some of them in reality just skirmishes – fought on English soil, from Dartford in Kent to Hexham in Northumberland to Mortimer’s Cross on the Welsh border.

There are those, of course, who would like to bin the label, but that is a vain hope. During the last quarter of the 20th century at least seven British historians published monographs entitled The Wars of the Roses, and scholars in the 21st century appear to be trying to keep pace.

Sure enough, Given-Wilson was reviewing The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War by John Watts.

Obliging reader's voice: I gather the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth is accepted as having marked the end of these wars. Have you by any chance contributed an article that touches upon it to Central Bylines recently?

Liberal England replies: Why yes! Yes I have.

The Joy of Six 1469

"What matters is not the books themselves, but the thinking they reward. They cultivate a taste for compression over depth, for transferable lessons over context, for confidence over uncertainty. They attract people who want the world to be legible in a handful of rules, who prefer inspiration to explanation, and who mistake momentum for understanding. Over time, this becomes a habit of mind: a way of approaching problems that privileges clarity and speed over patience and complexity." John Oxley fears British politics is suffering from Airport Book Brain.

Rosalind KennyBirch looks at the way Finland counters fake news. "There is no vaccine for fake news, but media literacy can come close."

Rose Runswick has posted Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's election address from 1906. Here he is on the record of the Conservatives: "The legacy which they have bequeathed to their successors – and I say it in no partisan spirit, but under a full sense of responsibility – is in the main a legacy of embarrassment, an accumulation of public mischief and confusion absolutely appalling in its extent and its ramifications."

"The Israel-Palestine conflict is often framed as a religious struggle between Muslim and Jewish groups, but the witness of Palestinian Christians exposes the hollowness of that narrative. It is a nationalist struggle between Israelis and Palestinians." John McHugo highlights the plight of Palestinian Christians.

"Stoke-on-Trent says it is facing a heritage emergency and needs £325m in public and private funding to safeguard its historic sites and stories," reports Rebecca Atkinson.

Gráinne Maguire lists five things Is This Thing On? gets wrong about the world of stand up: "Will Arnett has all the natural funny bones of a dead family pet. He wears the same expression the entire time—startled and blinking, like Eeyore caught looking up porn at work and hauled into HR. Yet we're supposed to believe this set – more misguided late-night voice note than comedy – is all it takes for him to be embraced by the world of comedy."

Lord Bonkers' Diary: it would be a pity if anything happened to them

Christmas week ends on a downbeat note. I've never been convinced that it was a good idea for F&F (that's Freddie and Fiona – the old boy has taken to using abbreviations in his diary, but then why shouldn't he?) to buy a weekend cottage in Rutland; they were always likely to upset the locals. 

And as Lord Bonkers has often remarked of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, "you don't want to get on the wrong side of these fellows".

Sunday

Back to St Asquith’s – I ought to get a season ticket what? – and then, after sherry with the Revd Hughes, to the Bonkers Arms for a pre-lunch stiffener. I find the talk is all of Freddie and Fiona and what they were saying at my Christmas Day party. Word has got about that they were talking about “privatising health” and it has Not Gone Down Well – we happen to be very proud of our cottage hospital. 

Worse than that, a garbled version of the story has reached Rockingham Forest in which they want to “privatise elf”, and you can just imagine how that was received by the local elves. So F&F would be well advised to lie low for a bit. As my old friend Violent BC might have put it, it would be a pity if anything happened to them.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year
• At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet
• He loves to get his dibber out
• Flags and empty cans of Dahrendorf lager
• Lowered head first through a skylight

The Charlatans: The Only One I Know

"It’s an unusual song construction. I’m still not sure which bit is the chorus. The title and main hook is in the verse, but the intro – before the main song crashes in – gives people just enough time to get on the dancefloor."

That's what the Charlatans' singer and the songs co-writer Tim Burgess told the Guardian in 2021.

He also explained one of the influences on its writing:

"I was 21 or 22, but still had those powerful emotions. I was a big Byrds fan so the line 'Everyone’s been burned before, everyone knows the pain' is a nod to their song Everybody’s Been Burned. I was ecstatic when the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn said he loved us."

The bass player and co-writer Martin Blunt explained another:

"To give The Only One I Know a bit more urgency, Jon Baker added a stream of repetitive guitar notes similar to part of the Supremes' You Keep Me Hangin' On. I remember telling him, ;Try to make it sound like morse code', which he did. After the second chorus, we dropped it down to the bass, like all the best old Stax and funk tunes."

The Only One I Know reached no. 9 in the UK singles chart in September 1990, even though the band refused to appear on Top of the Pops.

I also like what Brunt said about the Charlatans' development:

We’d been influenced by the Stranglers, Stax Records, Joy Division and the Doors, but when everything came together in the summer of 89 acid house was in full swing. The repetitive beats rubbed off on what we were doing, so we suddenly sounded like the Spencer Davis Group on E.

The Earth is healing: The Muppet Show is back

The blurb for this trailer on YouTube says it is "a special event", first being screened on February 4 on Disney+ and ABC.

Rhik Samadder has seen it and says in the Guardian:

Happily, it hasn’t been updated so Fozzie is doing bits on TikTok, or Rowlf protesting about streaming royalties. The guys are still trying to put on that variety show, and it’s still all going wrong.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Lowered head first through a skylight

I can't help noticing that Lord Bonkers does spent a great deal of time on roofs with orphans. I wonder what Ofsted makes of this practice. I also wonder if it is connected with a recent news story:

Police in Oakham have issued a stern warning to parents and young people after a spike in reports of individuals climbing onto the roofs of buildings across the town.

Saturday

Looking back over 2025, I remember with particular pleasure the November evening when the Well-Behaved Orphans insisted upon putting Nick Clegg’s principles into practice. Earlier in the year, Clegg had told everyone he had a right to take every writer’s and artist’s work without paying, so the WBOs decided, quite reasonably, that they must have a right to take Clegg’s work. 

Thus it was that I found myself on the roof of a local branch of Featherstones with an expert on burglar alarms recommended by old associates of Violent Bonham Carter, one of the more spry WBOs and a length of rope. The aforementioned orphan was then lowered head first through a skylight so that she could retrieve the shop’s copies of Clegg’s magnum opus one by one. 

In the interests of completeness, I must record that after her fellow orphans had tried reading them, they were all for returning the books the following evening.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year
• At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet
• He loves to get his dibber out
• Flags and empty cans of Dahrendorf lager

Strange Phenomena: The Films of Dario Argento

The British Film Institute's blurb onYouTube says:

In this video essay to coincide with our retrospective of Argento's work, season programmer Michael Blyth explores three characteristics which make his films so distinctive – his dynamic and impressionistic use of colour, his complex approach to gender and sexuality, and the surrealist logic of his narratives.

The Joy of Six 1468

"By-elections follow their own logic, not Westminster narratives, and Gorton and Denton has all the makings of a classic contest - a divided seat, polarising candidates and four different parties with a credible local claim. ... Gorton and Denton is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, formed ahead of the last general election when remnants of the abolished Manchester Gorton seat were stitched onto a chunk of the also abolished Denton and Reddish seat ... with Burnage ward, formerly in Manchester Withington, chucked on at the South West edge for good measure." Rob Ford marks your card for the coming by-election.

Mental Health Cop is not impressed by the new white paper on police reform: "It’s rather spectacular in all the wrong kinds of way because it misses rather a lot of important points, it plays undergraduate essay games with what policing actually is and what the public want it to be, and yes: it touches upon mental health as it’s primary example of the police doing non-police things which need to be cleared out of the way so they can 'fight crime and catch criminals'."

Miranda Sheild Johansson on how abolishing its wealth tax changed Sweden for the worse.

"Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, MOOCs (“Massive Open Online Courses”) were the exciting new technology that would revolutionize education – and perhaps even kill off the university as we knew it. With a MOOC, a single star lecturer would give the definitive course on topic X, and students everywhere would learn from the MOOC. Why replicate thousands of near-identical versions of Biology 101, each taught by a local lesser light, when students could all tune in to a masterpiece by the best instructor in the world?" Stephen Heard asks what happened to MOOCs.

James Kenney examines a favourite film in depth: "Breaking Away – a film that runs well under two hours and yet feels fuller than most contemporary movies – doesn’t linger, nor does it inflate moments to announce their importance. Themes aren’t announced in heavy-handed speeches. It moves generously and with grace through characters in motion and leaves them alive in our minds long after it ends."

"The chancel glows in green and gold, its walls painted with stylised flowers and leaves. The decoration, if overwhelming, also does an excellent job of defining the chancel as the most sacred space." Philip Wilkinson visit Wilmcote and its 19th-century Gothic Revival church. 

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Flags and empty cans of Dahrendorf lager

I know a lot of my readers won't approve of this, but how else would an English country gentleman spend Boxing Day but riding to hounds? Followers of the field may note a recent change in the quarry his hounds pursue.

Boxing Day

The bare winter fields. The snifter from the hip flask. The glorious movement of man and horse as one. The music of the hounds. Yes, I love hunting. 

Traditionally in Rutland we hunt not foxes but Trotskyites, but they are rare indeed these days, what with climate change and the loss of habitat. So this Boxing Day I am following the lead of some of my neighbours and hunting Reform UK activists instead. I realised I had them on my land when I came across flags and empty cans of Dahrendorf lager in one of my coverts. 

The sport is not good – they are much less fit than were the Trotskyites – but the swift denouement does allow time for further snifters.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year
• At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet
• He loves to get his dibber out

The railway from Carmarthen to Aberystwyth

To get from Carmarthen to Aberystwyth by train to today you have to go via Newport and Shrewsbury,* a journey that takes seven hours. Until December 1964, there was a direct service between the two.

Two years ago, BBC News ran an article about the possibility of it being reopened.

While you wait for that, enjoy this film of Carmarthen to Aberystwyth operating with steam locomotives.

* Thinking about it, the Heart of Wales line is more direct, but it's slow and there aren't many trains.

After reading this column you will never think of Barbara Cartland in the same way again

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Another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Barbara Cartland has her own label on this column, and I think all this material had appeared on Liberal England before, but I suspect it is not common knowledge among radical mental health professionals.

Barbara Cartland as a political activist

The writer Damian Le Bas once interviewed a man whose mother, a Conservative county councillor, had fought for travelling families to have somewhere to live and for their children to be educated. 

"People offer all sorts of reasons why they don’t want a Gypsy site near them,” said Le Bas. "You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the South of the United States of America."

The man replied: “It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty. My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered. She was not one to be deterred, my mother, in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Her name? Barbara Cartland.

When I told someone who I was writing this column about, they dredged up Clive James’s description of her on television in old age:

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

But then if Barbara Cartland is remembered at all today, it is for this late eccentricity of appearance. 

Matthew Sweet, who is writing her biography, has observed that, though you would expect her romantic novels, of which there were hundreds, dictated from a chaise-longue to relays of secretaries, to be a staple of charity shops, but they have not lasted. Not lasted physically, that is: they were cheaply produced and fell apart in the hands of a vigorous reader.

So, though Barbaraville Camp, a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield named in her honour, is still open, we have to look further back to pay Barbara Cartland her due.

******

The hero of The Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant’s study of the group of gay – if that’s not an anachronism – MPs who opposed appeasement in the run up to World War II, was meant to be Major Ronald Cartland, who died at Dunkirk aged 33. But doesn’t his sister keep breaking into the story?

Their father’s death had left Barbara and her two brothers in straitened circumstances, but they weren’t for long once she started writing. First there was a racy High Society novel with a fair amount of sexual innuendo, Jig-saw (1923), then a column for the Daily Express and risqué plays, one of which was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Bryant writes:

Barbara was no prude. She wrote wry and naughty copy for Bystander under the pseudonyms Miss Hamilton or Caviare, she turned out gossipy pieces for Tatler as Miss Scott and passed on titbits of society news as Miss Tudor in the Daily Mail. The copy she filed was invariably bubbly and enthusiastic, with no hint of the prim coyness that was so common at the time. Her advice to young women in her book of modern morals, Touch the Stars: A clue to happiness, was remarkable: 

Remember that you are not a miserable sinner… nor were you born in original sin; the sex instinct is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It is sent to inspire us, and help us understand Nature and the workings of the Divine. It is the nearest approach we get to the beauty, the intensity and the power of Life.

And in between all this writing, she found time to be the darling of the fast set at Brooklands motor racing circuit and a pioneer of gliding.

******

What first made me take Barbara Cartland seriously were her wartime memoirs, The Years of Opportunity, as they showed her to be a notably sensible voice in welfare work.

She defended servicewomen, saying the remarkable thing was how few unwanted babies there had been, given wartime conditions. And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being “stood a drink” for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the Medical Officer told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

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Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one RAF padre who had a straight talk with every man on his station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

She also wrote with understanding and compassion about the needs of children, particularly those in public care. In 1945, the death of Dennis O’Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, on a farm in Shropshire had scandalised the nation:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

She remembered a little boy who had come from a public institution to live in the cottage next to hers:

He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs, he didn’t know what to do with them. 

One of those boys was Ian McCorquodale, who was interviewed by Damian Le Bas.

And Cartland writes of her friend Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who deserves a column of her own: 

As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

It wasn’t all words either. In this volume of memoirs Cartland describes bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

******

The moral of this story is that someone who ends their days on television in a pink chiffon ballgown and caked with make-up – as I fully intend to do – can still be worthy of your respect.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: He loves to get his dibber out

Christmas Day at the Hall is a highlight of any year; if nothing else, it's a chance to give some favourite characters a walk-on part. As the the joke about Meadowcroft and his dibber... Yes, I have been watching Up Pompeii! on YouTube. why do you ask?

Christmas Day

There are those in the House who regard having two peerages as swanking, but I was still happy to invite Earl Russell (but Not His Big Band) for Christmas – there he is enjoying a joke on the stairs with the cheese heiress Paris Stilton and Sister Sid, the penguin rescued by Danny Chambers who discovered a vocation while secreted at the Convent of Our Lady of the Ballot Box in High Leicestershire. (The Sisters will be holding their own notorious shindig as I write these words – I shall be along presently.)

Freddie and Fiona are expounding their views on health policy to a rapidly diminishing audience, while our economics spokesperson Daisy Super holds court in the Orangery. The Wise Woman of Wing is forecasting forthcoming council by-elections with her Tarot pack, Bobby Dean is crooning “White Christmas” and Freddie van Mierlo is sketching allcomers in chalk.

Only Meadowcroft seems in low spirits: I know he is impatient for spring to come, as he loves to get his dibber out.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year
• At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet

Stubby Kaye: Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat

What with this and Jubilation T. Cornpone, I'm a big Stubby Kaye fan.

Showtime! Adapting and Acting in Charles Dickens's Stories

Here's a short video from the Charles Dickens Museum with some interesting talking heads, some of them descended from the great man.

There are particular mentions for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol.

The Joy of Six 1467

Claire Jones says Britain is sliding backwards into open racism: "Shame has evaporated. With skin colour as their yardstick, the UK’s self-appointed 'defence warriors' are having a field day shouting at anyone brown-skinned, from ordinary folk to celebrities and political figures, to 'go home'."

"While it’s relatively easy for regulators to monitor the actions of Snapchat or TikTok, it’s impossible to police the millions of websites that might contain forums and chats. Any policy shift will have failed if it ends up pushing kids into even less regulated places on the internet." A social media ban for under-16s would be popular but, asks James Clayton, would it really help?

"Off 16 planned non-London LTNs tracked by the researchers, just one was fully implemented – a failure rate of around 94 per cent." Megan Huws argues that councils lack resources to deliver Low Traffic Neighbourhoods amid the culture wars.

Leanne Tritton on the difficulty of reusing redundant buildings in Britain today.

James Bloodworth looks at what the fame Russell Brand enjoyed until recently tells us about our society.

"It's a shot of such pure emotion and simple poignancy that it is regularly cited as the greatest ending in cinematic history. In the 95 years since City Lights' release, numerous films have tried to replicate its subtle artistry and the power of its performances." Gregory Wakeman watches a Charlie Chaplin masterpiece.

For Central Bylines: The discovery of Richard III enriched Leicester in every way

I've written another article for Central Bylines. This one celebrates the discovery of Richard III beneath Leicester's most famous car park, and also defends the city against Yorkists and archaeology against Steve Coogan:

Having lived in both cities, I know that, in terms of pub and street names, Richard has always had a greater presence in Leicester than York. You will even find a King Richard III Infant and Nursery School in Leicester – Ofsted rates it as “Good”, but would you send your nephews there?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: At a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet

Lord Bonkers made much the same observation about a choirboy singing Lloyd George Knew My Father in the first Christmas diary I helped him with. As the was published in Liberator 35 years ago, I reasoned that I could repeat it without boring his audience. 

And while I'm talking to people who weren't born when I began writing this nonsense, yes, in 1981 the SDP really did hold a rolling conference that took the train through Perth, Bradford and London.

Christmas Eve

I do not regard Christmas as having properly begun until I hear the piping voice of a choirboy tackle the opening verse of “Lloyd George Knew My Father”. As usual, the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Asquith’s is a triumph, and my enjoyment of it is only enhanced by the presence in the pew behind me of Cook’s rich contralto. I hear her urge choirs of angels to “sing in exculpation”, learn that “the holly bears a pickle” and harmonise with her when the organist strikes up “In the Beith Midwinter”. 

As to the lessons, Wera Duckworth reads from the work of that great Liberal L.T. Duckworth; William and Jim Wallace read Graham Wallas; and I tell the joke about Roy Jenkins and the lavatory brush that once had me set down from the SDP’s rolling conference train at a signal box outside Sherburn in Elmet.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too
• I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year

Derbyshire bakery recruiting volunteer taste tester after pork pie furore

This just in... At a meeting this evening, the judges have awarded Headline of the Day to the Derbyshire Times.

Lord Bonkers suggests the bakery send a press gang to Melton Mowbray.

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York

Andrew Lownie

William Collins, 2025; £22

Before he turned to royal biographies, Andrew Lownie wrote about Britain’s intelligence services, and he reports that he found the spies far more cooperative than he has ever found the royal family. It’s not just that many people in the know won’t talk, it’s that papers are kept secret and can be destroyed on a whim. This eye-opening biography of the aristo formerly known as Prince Andrew has been overtaken by events since it was published and can now be found on sale at a healthy discount, but it remains an impressive monument to research against the odds.

Andrew’s spoilt childhood (very different from that of his older brother), fraught marriage, shady business involvements and friendships with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are all dissected, and every claim appears well sourced. In interviews Lownie talks of being forced to leave things out by the lawyers and promises fresh revelations to come.

We get no strong sense of what Andrew is like as a person, perhaps because he lacks a coherent character – Lownie suggests his life has been bedevilled by the difficulty of deciding when he’s a prince and when he’s a normal person. Or as one young woman put it more picturesquely after a weekend house party: “One minute you’re having your bum pinched and the next minute he’s reminding you he’s Your Royal Highness”.

The picture Entitled paints of the royal family, with members leaking against each other to the press, is not an appealing one. Andrew’s role – he ceased to be needed once his brother had fathered two healthy children – is particularly unenviable, which makes you conclude that Harry did well to get out when he did.

Recent events in the United States have made us realise the virtues of a parliamentary system. Despite a thumping Conservative majority, the Commons forced two inadequate prime ministers out of office in the autumn of 2022, but it remains to be seen whether the US still satisfies Karl Popper’s pragmatic definition of a democracy – a country in which it is possible to remove a leader without violence. That uncertainty also makes a constitutional monarchy more attractive, but the reader still comes away from Lownie’s book suspecting it’s not only Andrew who needs to grow up a bit. When it comes to our reverence for the royals, we all do.

This review appears in issue 433 of Liberator magazine.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year

I'm pleased to see the Well-Behaved Orphans' having a better time of it today. Lord Bonkers had the Village Hall renamed as the Alexandra Hall Hall Hall during Donald Trump's first term, and I note that he very nearly quotes an Elvis Costello lyric here.

Tuesday

To the Alexandra Hall Hall Hall for the Christmas party I hold every year for the village children and Well-Behaved Orphans – ginger beer flows like vintage champagne and I insist on trying every cake to make sure it’s up to snuff. The afternoon’s entertainment is provided by a strangely familiar magician. Then it hits me: it’s Kwasi Kwarteng! 

He, you may recall, was Chancellor for several days under the reign of that strange, pixie-looking woman who jumped ship to the Tories when Conference refused to support her motion saying she should be Queen. Unfortunately, Kwarteng proves no more adept as a prestidigitator than he was as custodian of the nation’s finances. In attempting to retrieve a rabbit from his hat, he sets fire to the stage; and as he runs about in a panic, his trousers fall down. 

Fortunately, the youth of Rutland are of stronger mettle than Old Etonians: a stream of ginger beer is directed at the heart of the blaze, and the WBOs form a human chain to bring pails of water from the pond. The consensus among my young guests is that it has been the best party ever, so I hurry to book the rather singed Kwarteng for next year.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week...

• The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too

The five railway stations of Long Eaton

Here's another great video from Trekking Exploration – like and subscribe everybody. I've visited the sites four of the five Long Eaton stations he identifies myself.

The first would be really useful to the town now, as it;s on the line from Nottingham to St Pancras.

The second is the one I haven't visited.

The third was in the centre of town - the line is still in use, but only by goods trains.

The fourth is Trent Station, one of those large interchange stations in the middle of nowhere that the Midland Railway went in for. Here I have the advantage over the video as I have photographed the very overgrown bridge it mentions. You can see it below. On my first hunt for it I got as far as Trent Cottages.

The fifth is the Long Eaton station that is open today, though its further from the town than any of the other four.

Leicestershire Reform councillor tweeted in support of ICE after the shooting of Alex Pretti

Joseph Boam, the Remain councillor and former deputy leader of Leicestershire County Council. tweeted an image including the words "I Stand With Ice" after the shooting of the nurse Alex Pretti.

As LBC notes, even Donald Trump has so far hesitated to defend the shooting, which saw Preti hit 10 times in five seconds.

Not so Leicestershire Reform's 22-year-old boy wonder Boam:

Following backlash from his initial tweet, Mr Boam doubled down on his approval for the agency saying: "For the people that don’t support ICE - Are you suggesting that the UK should not enforce its immigration law?

"When I said I support ICE’s work, I mean that I support the enforcement of immigration law, which is the task of Immigration Control and Enforcement aka ICE. That is what I stand by."

Which rather suggests that, as well as being unable to tell right from wrong, he has not yet grasped the difference between the United Kingdom and the United States.

Boam was appointed deputy leader of the county council after reform took minority control in May, but was sacked by the leader before August was out.

You can see why.

"Like trying to do geometry with blancmange": My Liberator article on Blue Labour

Move over Lord Bonkers: I have an article in the new Liberator (issue 344). You can download the whole issue for free from the magazine's website.

Nor for the first time, I am led to reflect on how hoary my cultural touchstones are growing. The first series of Reggie Perrin was originally screened 50 years ago - it's as though there had been a Liberator contributor when I first joined the editorial collective whose articles relied upon his readers having knowledge of comedy from the early Thirties.

But don't blame me: I've been waiting for a new generation of young Radicals to sweep us to one side since at least 1990, but they have never appeared.

A Better Yesterday

I’ve finally worked out who it is that Blue Labour reminds me of: it’s Doc Morrisey from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. In the classic sitcom written by David Nobbs, Perrin, deep in the throes of a midlife crisis, seeks help from Sunshine Desserts’ company doctor. They have the following conversation.

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can't finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can't stop thinking about sex, can't start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during Play For Today?

Reginald Perrin: That's extraordinary, Doc! That's exactly how I've been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is? Take two aspirins.

Blue Labour, though some MPs claim to owe allegiance to this tendency, is largely Maurice Glasman, and Maurice Glasman is entirely Blue Labour. And the only coherent thread running through the pronouncements of Maurice Glasman (Lord Glasman – he was made a peer by Ed Miliband in 2010) is an ill-focused, Perrinesque nostalgia for the past of his country and party.

Even that is being kind to him when you consider the misshapen catch that comes up when you trawl for his recent media appearances. Among the views he has expressed are that “in order to be truly radical, Labour must recognise its debt to Jesus Christ”; that the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target is a fantasy that should be abandoned in favour of new fossil fuel extraction while the national grid is taken over by the Ministry of Defence; and that Shabana Mahmood is like Elizabeth I – “She’s devoted to her job. She’s unique.” If Glasman were a social media account, you would have muted it long ago.

Visit the Blue Labour website in search of more intellectual substance and you will be disappointed. The featured post there is What Is to Be Done, which dates from October 2025 and is written in a semi-apocalyptic style: “The hour is late.” Nevertheless, there is something in its analysis that Keir Starmer won a “loveless landslide” and came to power without much of a legislative programme or analysis of the country’s problems behind him.

The trouble with What Is to Be Done is that it’s full of grand statements like “We should bring public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel, back into public ownership,” but short of any practical proposals for how such ideas can be put into action. And when it does get close to making such proposals, what we get is an agenda that will be familiar to anyone with a very online Conservative MP: “drastically” reduce immigration, curb the powers of the courts, tell the police to concentrate on repeat offenders. Explore the Blue Labour website and you will find the same high ambitions and shortage of detail in other documents, even its Plan for National Reconstruction. 

All of which makes it a surprise to find Compass publishing a document billed as making “the case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour politics”. It’s Soft Skills, Hard Labour by Frances Foley, who was until recently the group’s deputy director. A surprise because, though it is affiliated to the Labour Party, Compass’s emphasis on cross-party working and support for proportional representation has meant that Liberals tend to feel quite warm towards it. So sensible is it that it’s chair Neal Lawson has been threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party.

Enter Compass

Lawson, incidentally, shares Glasman’s sense that Keir Starmer lacks direction. In a recent Guardian piece, he suggested that Starmer was promoted as Labour leader by people who decided he was the man to drive Corbynism out of the party. They assumed there was no chance of the Conservatives being defeated in 2024, so didn’t worry about his shortcomings as a future prime minister. He would be gone before Labour got in again. Yet so rapid was the Conservative collapse that Starmer found himself in Number 10. It’s a neat mirror image of the Labour left-winger who said in 2015: “If we’d thought we had a chance of winning the leadership then Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t have been our candidate.”

There is no such clarity to be found in Soft Skills, Hard Labour. Foley’s method is to look at different tendencies within Soft Labour and Blue Labour and then map how they complement each other or conflict across the divide. So we have chapters titled “Postliberal Democrats’ challenge to the Rules-based Majoritarians” and “Democratic Communitarians’ challenge to the Rights-based Liberals”. It’s a brave effort, but her two main concepts are so diffuse to begin with that it’s like trying to do geometry with blancmange.

It may be that Blue Labour has more to it than Glasman’s eccentricities – his other recent contributions to debate include apologising to Nigel Farage live on GB News after Keir Starmer said the Reform leader’s immigration policy was “racist and immoral” and claiming that progressive liberals “don’t want you to enjoy anything, not even sex with your wife!” There is an essay collection edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics – but it was published in the very different world of 2015, where it billed itself as seeking to “move beyond the centrist pragmatism of Blair and Cameron”.

Iconoclasm

Frances Foley is attracted to the appetite she sees in Blue Labour for iconoclasm, which is an attraction I imagine anyone who works in the very on-message world of pro-Labour think-tanks is likely to feel after a while. She may even be demob happy: her brief biography in Soft Skills, Hard Labour reveals she is leaving Compass “to set up a new programme matching young people with jobs in climate, whilst training them in political organising,” which sounds more valuable than what most think-tanks produce.

Whatever the reason, she is right to say:

The word “progressive” strongly implies that change is always for the better, rather than to be questioned or resisted. It also suggests that “progress” is a meaningful – and crucially agreed upon – political concept.

That is why I try to avoid using this concept, though a stronger reason is the argument put forward by Simon Titley, late of this parish: 

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

Similarly, when Foley writes of what she terms “Rights-based Liberals”:

They tend to assert the primacy of rights as a priori, not as social constructs created by citizens, but as a first order framework that sets the parameters for what is politically viable. In this sense, Rights-based Liberals see rights as trumping pure democratic sovereignty, setting limits on what democratic societies can decide. 

she is right about the attitude of many on the left towards rights: we should never forget they are human inventions and not somehow ordained by nature. 

There is a better, more pragmatic argument for human rights: by inventing them we increase the chances that government will treat us well. A good example of this is the right to petition for a writ of habeus corpus – a right hoary enough, surely, to win the support of even Maurice Glasman. Nor is it clear how the working class will benefit from any abolition of rights: it’s the powerful who benefit in a free-for-all, as we see in news reports from the US every evening.

But then it’s often hard to see how the working class will benefit from any Blue Labour policies. The only mention of education you’re likely to come across in Blue Labour circles is vocational education: you rarely get the sense that they are much interested in the number of working-class university students or entrepreneurs. What they are telling working-class young people is that somewhere there is a lathe with your name on it and I remain unconvinced that is what all of them want.

Nostalgia

It's easy, and it’s largely justifiable, to dismiss Blue Labour as offering nostalgia for a vanished industrial world, but too much comment on social media from people who like to think they are on the left treats the past as something to point at and laugh. Such comment is all about the performative adoption of approved cultural opinions: nowhere will you see it mentioned that the Fifties saw full employment and record levels of trade union membership or that the Seventies saw the greatest income equality Britain has ever enjoyed. 

One thing Blue Labour has got right is that many self-styled “progressives” aren’t much interested in the working class: it’s just that I’m not convinced Blue Labour is much interested in the working class as it exists today either. Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

Treating the past as a reminder that our current economic and social arrangements are not set in stone and things could be and have been different is sensible. But demanding we return to this past, and demanding it without so much as making a gesture towards providing a route map, is ridiculous. I didn’t get where I am today without knowing the difference.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too

The new Liberator has dropped – you can download issue 433 free of charge from the magazine's website – which means it's time to start another week in the company of the doyen of Liberal Democrat peers.

I worry about the Well-Behaved Orphans: their lives aren't all holidays at Lord Bonkers' favourite Cornish resort Trescothick Bay.

Monday

Having risen early, I spy a party of Well-Behaved Orphans trudging across the muddy fields. Christmas is not a hectic time on the old estate like the potato harvest is, but there will still be work for them to do. It is gratifying that the Liberal Democrats have endorsed my ‘Farm First’ scheme as a model all should follow. 

Equally, as someone who comes from an ancient family and owns many farms, I am delighted that our opposition to the ‘Family Farm Tax’ has borne fruit. I hear on the aristocratic grapevine that the Duke of Buccleuch is pretty chuffed too.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Lib Dems call for a Rail Passengers’ Charter to improve journeys across the UK

The Liberal Democrats introduce a Rail Passengers’ Charter Bill in Parliament last week to improve customer experience and enshrine value for money into law.

The proposed charter would guarantee standards such as wifi, clean toilets and automatic compensation by law.

It would also require adequate seating on journeys longer than 30 minutes and on-board refreshments for trips exceeding two hours.

The party's transport spokesperson Olly Glover told the Oxford Mail:

"After years of passengers putting up with above-inflation fare increases for poor rail services, it’s time to bring the passenger experience into the 21st century.

"Customers deserve so much better than the sub-par service at great expense but both the Conservatives and Labour in government have failed to put passengers first.

"That’s why the Liberal Democrats are introducing the Rail Passengers’ Charter to enshrine in law improvements to customer experience and value for money so that our railways are something we can be proud of."

Olly Glover is the Lib Dem MP for Didcot and Wantage.

The photo above is also from Oxfordshire. I took it on Banbury station many years ago while waiting for a direct train to Shrewsbury. We should bring those back under our charter.

The Joy of Six 1466

Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, says AI nudification is the latest weapon of violence against women and girls: "Using AI to strip a woman of her clothes is the modern equivalent of locking her in stocks in the town square and throwing rotten fruit at her. It is a weapon of shame, designed to humiliate. Like other pillories, it is meant to send a message to everyone else: do not do what this woman has done."

"The shortage of legal children’s homes across the UK is fast becoming a national crisis. Last week, a Public Accounts Committee report revealed that nearly 800 children were sent to live in illegal accommodation in 2024, staying an average of around six months each." Gareth Davies and Tom Wall report on a national scandal.

Chris Grey on Donald Trump, Greenland and Mark Carney: "Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism."

Emma McClarkin argues that Britain's tax regime is forcing pubs to raise the price of a pint.

"After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern." Julie Phillips on Ursula Le Guin the political activist.

"As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat." Natalie Guest visits Ilford pet cemetery.

Supremes: Standing at the Crossroads of Love

I was going to choose the Four Tops' Standing in the Shadows of Love, but I got reading and found that some sources suggest it was a reworking of this earlier Supremes B-side. To my untutored ears the two records don't have much more in common than their similar titles, but that would have been a very Motown thing to do.

Motown Junkies loves Standing at the Crossroads of Love:

Vibes, organ, high notes aplenty; a shimmering crystal castle of an intro, giving way to Diana Ross, who joins in by clambering youthfully right up to the top of her range to give a shrill, thin rendition of the title phrase.

The end is near for Desborough's Lawrence Shoe Factory

The former Lawrence Shoe Factory in Desborough is likely to be demolished later this year, reports BBC News.

As I can catch a bus to Desborough and it's unusually pleasant Costa Coffee from across the road when I'm feeling too lazy to walk into town, I went there the other day to photograph the buildings again – maybe for the last time. You can read about their history on the Desborough Town Council website.

There was the usual talk from North Northamptonshire Council's Reform UK leadership of "eyesores" and preventing antisocial behaviour, but there is no sign of the long-sought developer for the site, so it will become wasteland.

At least the derelict shop, which must once have catered for the needs of the workers here, will survive the coming destruction.

Michael Elwyn talks about appearing in Joe Orton's Loot

I once went to an event in Leicester to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joe Orton's play Loot. It doesn't feel like it, but it was almost 10 years ago.

In the post I wrote about the event, I described meeting Braham Murray and Michael Elwyn there. They had, respectively, directed and appeared in a Manchester production of Loot that established its reputation after its first staging in London had been a failure.

I recently found this video of Michael Elwyn, which may well have been recorded that day – we were all given the badge he is wearing. In it he talks about meeting Orton and his experience of appearing in the play.